Sharif Digital Repository

Cooperative control of autonomous multi-agent systems is one of the challenging problems in control theory. According to existing enhancements in communication networks and broad application of multi-agent systems in various engineering fields, coordinated motion control in multi-agent systems has been attracted the attention of researchers in control science. In this thesis, flocking algorithms in multi-agent systems with undirected interactions (bidirectional information flow) is considered and new convergence results and final characteristics are obtained. Also, geometric optimization methods are used to propose a new optimization problem to reduce the number of informed agents of the... 

In this study, membrane distillation was used for desalination of high saline water. Recently, the synthesis of nanoparticles for the synthesis of membranes for membrane distillation has shown incredible improvement in the morphological properties, flux, and rejection. In this study, by incorporating UiO-66 functionalized with Palmitic acid into PVDF/PEG polymer solution we could improve membranes properties. Functionalization of UiO-66 with Palmitic acid was confirmed with FTIR, XRD, BET, SEM. In the membrane containing 3% Palmitic acid-UiO-66, the flux was increased by 46.5%, resulting in a flux of 12.6 LMH, and the salt rejection was improved from 99.5% to 99.9%. These results confirmed... 

Forecasting has a crucial role for decision makers in economics and finance and is frequently used by firms, government institutions and professional economists. Academic studies in macroeconomics modeling and economic forecasting have been historically concentrated on models with few variables. But in practice, a decision maker has a large amount of information in the form of variables which has some predictive content for the target variable. One way to handle the large-scale information in forecasting is to use forecast combination methods. These methods generally combine the simple forecasts of some target variable while the forecasts are weighted according to their relative accuracy,... 

Organ-on-chip microfluidic devices create a three-dimensional and dynamic model that allows researchers to model diseases and test different drug candidates. In this regard, using a lung-on-a-chip microfluidic device, Covid-19 disease was numerically modeled. Initially, the distribution of oxygen concentration in the blood and respiratory membrane in the healthy state; when the respiratory membrane is the only barrier between air and blood; was found and observed that in this case, the length that the blood had to travel to reach full saturation was the same in the alveolar capillaries and the lung-on-a-chip microdevice. Then, to simulate the different phases of the disease, the formation of... 

In this manuscript, we designed and fabricated a novel integrated microfluidic Kidney Nephron-On-Chip. This chip is able to culture cell monolayers under various fluid shear stresses and divert osmotic pressure gradients while imposing four different concentrations of an injected drug on cells. The multi-layer platform consisting of two bubble-trappers to eliminate all unwanted bubbles from the system, a concentration gradient generator to generate four different concentrations of the injected drug, and a membrane-based cell culture chamber caple of providing renal cells with their in-vivo condition. Using colorimetric techniques, the bubble trapper ability was quantified at flow rates up to...