Sharif Digital Repository

One of the main challenges in arid and semi-arid regions is the lack of water for various purposes such as industrial and agricultural applications. The problem is even more significant in traditional agriculture. The geographical location, climatic conditions, average annual rainfall, vegetation, air pollution and turbidity, and canopy of plants are important and lead to different water consumption in plants. Therefore, proper water consumption in agriculture in most countries leads to food security and a better supply of crops. In this research, we propose a fuzzy system that has eight inputs and seven outputs. Inputs include soil moisture, relative humidity, air temperature, wind speed,... 

Nanoparticle copper/carbon composite films were prepared by co-deposition of RF-Sputtering and RF-PECVD method from acetylene gas and copper target. We investigate deposition process in the region where by changing pressure, the process converts to physical sputtering mode in constant power regime and at a critical pressure between 1.5 to 3 Pa. The estimated value of mean ion energy at this critical point of pressure is close to threshold energy of physical sputtering of copper atoms by acetylene ions. By utilizing this property and by setting initial pressure from 1.3 to 6.6 Pa, nanoparticles copper/carbon composite films were grown with different copper content. The Copper content of our... 

A different approach in the calculation of two-dimensional local density of states has been presented for a two-dimensional finite rectangular-lattice photonic crystal with a separable profile of permittivity. Approximate staircase structures are already shown to be useful for their ability to reproduce actual properties of practical square lattice photonic crystals. Using the effective resonance approach in a Fabry-Perot resonator and transfer matrix method an analytical expression for calculating a two-dimensional local density of states can be derived for both polarisations in the structure. It is shown that for this geometry one can resolve the modes as a product of two separate... 

Frequent instruction cache (L1-I) misses pose a significant performance bottleneck in modern processors, especially for applications with large instruction footprints, such as server applications. To address the L1-I misses, there have been various proposals for L1-I prefetching over the past two decades. The designers of L1-I prefetchers primarily focused on enhancing performance while minimizing the area overhead. However, they paid little attention to the resulting increase in energy consumption due to incorporating an L1-I prefetcher. Furthermore, prior works assume L1-I prefetcher's energy consumption is mainly due to its area overhead. In this work, we demonstrate that a substantial... 

Background:: Since the cornea is responsible for transmitting and focusing light into the eye, injury or pathology affecting any layer of the cornea can cause a detrimental effect on visual acuity. Aging is also a reason for corneal degeneration. Depending on the level of the injury, conservative therapies and donor tissue transplantation are the most common treatments for corneal diseases. Not only is there a lack of donor tissue and risk of infection/rejection, but the inherent ability of corneal cells and layers to regenerate has led to research in regenerative approaches and treatments. Methods:: In this review, we first discussed the anatomy of the cornea and the required properties for... 

When the periodic permittivity of two-dimensional (2D) photonic crystal (PC) can be separated in x- and y- coordinates, one can consider the structure as two separate 1D photonic crystals, one of them being periodic in x coordinate and the other in y coordinate. If it is possible to find a proper separable permittivity function, we can approximate a 2D PC with two distinct 1D structures. One of the advantages is rapid calculation the density of state of a 2D PC. In this article an analytical calculation of the density of states for such a 2D PC has been done with the aim of taking this advantage. For calculating the density of states we use the effective resonance approach to analyze the 1D... 

The highly pathogenic, novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has emerged as a once-in-a-century pandemic with poor consequences, urgently calling for new therapeutics, cures, and supportive interventions. It has already affected over 250 million people worldwide; thereby, there is a need for novel therapies to alleviate the related complications. There is a paradigm shift in developing drugs and clinical practices to combat COVID-19. Several clinical trials have been performed or are testing diverse pharmacological interventions to alleviate viral load and complications such as cytokine release storm (CRS). Kinase-inhibitors have appeared as potential antiviral agents for COVID-19... 

The objective of this study was to develop and validate a novel 3D dynamic model of a pelvic side-impactor system. The biomechanical responses of a pelvic flexible model (having.mnf file suffix) under the lateral impact load for predicting the bone fracture mechanism are investigated as well. The 3D solid model of the side-impactor system was imported into MSC/ADAMS software for analyzing the dynamic model, and the pelvic flexible model was extracted from the CT images of a Chinese female volunteer. The flexible model of the pelvis system was developed considering a wide range of mechanical properties in the bone complex and soft tissue to achieve a realistic biomechanical response during a... 

Gelatin methacrylate (GelMA) was proved to be a promising bioink for corneal stromal cell delivery. However, GelMA has low mechanical properties which makes it difficult to be suturable and handled for clinical applicattion. In this study, three different ratios of 12.5 % GelMA and 10 % PEGDA were investigated for corneal stromal cells delivery. The mixture containing 75 % GelMA and 25 % PEGDA (75G25P) was found to have reasonable cell viability and suturing strength. Moreover, collagen nanofibers were incorporated into 75G25P hydrogel to improve the mechanical and biomimetic properties of the construct (75G25P-E). A hybrid structure was obtained by injecting the optimized bioink on the... 

Collagen-based hydrogels are promising constructs used frequently as scaffolds in various tissue engineering applications. The source of collagen extraction can influence the physiochemical properties, mechanical strength, as well as cellular behaviour of the tissue-engineered hydrogels. In the present study, type I collagen was isolated from three different animal sources, namely bovine Achilles tendon, bighead carp fish skin, and rat tail tendons. After characterizing the extracted collagens, their structures were modified via covalent functionalization of the free amines with methacrylate groups. Methacrylated collagens were combined with PEG-diacrylate to act as three-dimensional... 

Abstract: 3D bioprinting technology is a promising approach for corneal stromal tissue regeneration. In this study, gelatin methacrylate (GelMA) mixed with corneal stromal cells was used as a bioink. The visible light-based stereolithography (SLA) 3D bioprinting method was utilized to print the anatomically similar dome-shaped structure of the human corneal stroma. Two different concentrations of GelMA macromer (7.5 and 12.5%) were tested for corneal stroma bioprinting. Due to high macromer concentrations, 12.5% GelMA was stiffer than 7.5% GelMA, which made it easier to handle. In terms of water content and optical transmittance of the bioprinted scaffolds, we observed that scaffold with... 

A hybrid scaffold of gelatin-glycosaminoglycan matrix and fibrin (FGG) has been synthesized to improve the mechanical properties, degradation time and cell response of fibrin-like scaffolds. The FGG scaffold was fabricated by optimizing some properties of fibrin-only gel and gelatin-glycosaminoglycan (GG) scaffolds. Mechanical analysis of optimized fibrin-only gel showed the Young module and tensile strength of up to 72 and 121 KPa, respectively. Significantly, the nine-fold increase in the Young modulus and a seven-fold increase in tensile strength was observed when fibrin reinforced with GG scaffold. Additionally, the results demonstrated that the degradation time of fibrin was enhanced... 

Many research works have been done in face recognition during the last years that indicates the importance of face recognition systems in many applications including identity authentication. In this paper we propose an approach for face recognition which is suitable for unconstrained image acquisition and has a low computational cost. Since in practical applications such as in smartphones, imaging conditions are not limited to existing images in the database, robustness of the recognition algorithm is very important. Here a sparse representation framework is proposed which achieves some degree of robustness. Using double sparse representation the high computational cost of sparsity-based... 

Radiation-induced multiple event transients (METs) are expected to become more frequent than single event transients (SETs) at nanoscale CMOS technology nodes. In this paper, a fast and accurate layout-based soft error rate (SER) assessment technique with consideration of both SET and MET fault models is presented. Despite existing techniques in which the adjacent MET sites are extracted from a logic-level netlist, we conduct a comprehensive layout analysis to obtain MET adjacent cells. Experimental results reveal that the layout-based technique is the only viable solution for identification of the adjacent cells as netlist-based techniques considerably underestimate the overall SER.... 

In this paper, we propose a very fast analytical approach to measure the overall circuit Soft Error Rate (SER) and to identify the most vulnerable gates and flip-flops. In the proposed approach, we first compute the error propagation probability from an error site to primary outputs as well as system bistables. Then, we perform a multi-cycle error propagation analysis in the sequential circuit. The results show that the proposed approach is four to five orders of magnitude faster than the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation-based fault injection approach with 92% accuracy. This makes the proposed approach applicable to industrial-scale circuits