Sharif Digital Repository

The controlled release of antigens from injectable depots has been actively pursued to achieve long-lasting immune responses in vaccine development. Nonetheless, subcutaneous depots are often susceptible to foreign body responses (FBRs) dominated by macrophage clearance and fibrotic encapsulation, resulting in limited antigen delivery to target dendritic cells (DCs) that bridge innate and adaptive immunity. Here, we aim to develop a long-term antigen depot that can bypass FBR and engage DCs to mature and migrate to lymph nodes to activate antigen-specific T-cells. Leveraging the immunomodulatory properties of exogenous polysaccharides and the anti-fouling characteristics of zwitterionic... 

DeePore2 is a deep learning workflow for rapid estimation of a wide range of porous material properties based on the binarized micro–tomography images. By combining naturally occurring porous textures we generated 17,700 semi–real 3–D micro–structures of porous geo–materials with size of 2563 voxels and 30 physical properties of each sample are calculated using physical simulations on the corresponding pore network models. Next, a designed feed–forward convolutional neural network (CNN) is trained based on the dataset to estimate several morphological, hydraulic, electrical, and mechanical characteristics of the porous material in a fraction of a second. In order to fine–tune the CNN design,... 

In this paper, we describe a carbon dioxide mineralization process and its associated solid products. These solid products include amorphous silica, iron hydroxides and magnesium carbonates. These products were subjected to various characterization tests, and the results are published here. It was found that the iron hydroxides from this process can have different crystalline properties, and their formation depended very much on the pH of the reaction conditions. Different forms of magnesium carbonate were also obtained, and the type of carbonate precipitated was found to be dependent on the carbonation temperature. Hydromagnesite was obtained mainly at low temperatures, while dypingite was... 

We extend the study of long-mode perturbations to other large-scale observables such as cosmic rulers, galaxy-number counts, and halo bias. The long mode is a pure gradient mode that is still outside an observer's horizon. We insist that gradient-mode effects on observables vanish. It is also crucial that the expressions for observables are relativistic. This allows us to show that the effects of a gradient mode on the large-scale observables vanish identically in a relativistic framework. To study the potential modulation effect of the gradient mode on halo bias, we derive a consistency condition to the first order in gradient expansion. We find that the matter variance at a fixed physical... 

We study the primary entanglement effect on the decoherence of reduced-density matrices of scalar fields, which interact with other fields or independent mode functions. We study the (leading) tree-level evolution of the scalar bispectrum due to a coupling between two scalar fields. We show that the primary entanglement has a significant role in the decoherence of the given quantum state. We find that the existence of such an entanglement could couple dynamical equations coming from a Schrödinger equation. We show that if one wants to see no effect of the entanglement parameter in the decohering of the quantum system, then the ground state eigenvalues of the interaction terms in the... 

Physical separation methods, especially membrane technology, can be a good substitute for biological wastewater treatment, due to its simple constructions and operations. There are many papers and patents in this field. Membranes need to be cleaned periodically to be able to operate economically, and need to be replaced after a while. Several factors can influence the membrane cleaning procedure, including pressure of backwash, acid and base concentration, duration of forward washing, and duration of acid-base backwashing. In this study the effect of these parameters was investigated to find an optimum condition which could result in a good polyethersulphone (PES) membrane cleaning with less... 

In this work, the process of starch removal from starchy wastewater using a hydrophilic polyethersulfone membrane was investigated. The pore size of the membrane was 0.65 μm and the pattern of stream in plate and frame handmade membrane module was cross-flow. To design the layout of the experiments, response surface methodology was applied. The performance of the filtration process was evaluated by calculating the (chemical oxygen demand) COD removal percentage (rejection factor) and permeate flux. In this study, five operative parameters were investigated, including trans-membrane pressure, flow rate and temperature of feed, pH, and the COD concentration of starch wastewater. Two models... 

One of the main requisites for multi agent researchers is a multi-purpose infrastructure that enables them to create, test and evaluate protocols, methods and algorithms. RoboCupRescue simulation environment is a flexible and configurable environment that can fill this gap. With changes in its configuration files, it will gain different features, so different methods can be designed, implemented, and tested. This environment is actually suitable for most multi-agent research issues such as cooperation, coordination, agent communication languages, and agent micro level issues. Sensible roles and tasks in the system motivate more research and make this environment a suitable infrastructure for... 

We study various derivations of Hawking radiation in conformally rescaled metrics. We focus on two important properties, the location of the horizon under a conformal transformation and its associated temperature. We find that the production of Hawking radiation cannot be associated in all cases to a trapping horizon because its location is not invariant under a conformal transformation. We also find evidence that the temperature of the Hawking radiation should transform simply under a conformal transformation, being invariant for asymptotic observers in the limit that the conformal transformation factor is unity at their location  

Ultrasonic assisted grinding is a novel method for improving the grinding process of difficult-to-cut materials. In the present research a novel setup has been designed and manufactured for utilizing ultrasonic vibrations in external cylindrical grinding. The designed ultrasonic head vibrates a rotating workpiece in axial direction. An alumina-zirconia ceramic (AZ90) has been selected as the workpiece material. Energy aspects and workpiece surface characteristics of ultrasonic assisted cylindrical grinding (UACG) and conventional cylindrical grinding (CG) processes have been analytically modeled and corresponding grinding experiments have been performed. The combined kinematics of the... 

Carbon dioxide sequestration by a pH-swing carbonation process was considered in this work. A multi-step aqueous process is described for the fractional precipitation of magnesium carbonate and other minerals in an aqueous system at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. With the aim to achieve higher purity and deliver more valuable mineral products, the process was split into four steps. The first step consists of Mg leaching from the magnesium silicate in a stirred vessel using 1 M HCl at 80 °C, followed by a three step precipitation in reactors in sequence to remove Fe(OH)3, then Fe(OH)2 and other divalent ions, and finally MgCO3 nucleation and growth. Hydrated magnesium carbonate... 

TIGRE, the UCR Compton gamma-ray telescope, is designed to make use of the Compton recoil electron track to improve the flux sensitivity in the medium gamma-ray energy range (0.4-100 MeV). TIGRE uses multilayers of silicon strip detectors to track Compton scattered electrons, and CsI detectors to measure the scattered photon energy and direction. In this work, using Monte-Carlo simulation, we show the improvement that can be obtained when the electron tracking feature is added to a conventional Compton telescope. In simulating a Crab-like source in a balloon-background environment, the flux sensitivity for TIGRE is enhanced by a factor of 2.5 and the source location accuracy by a factor 3... 

TIGRE, the UCR Compton gamma-ray telescope, uses multilayers of silicon strip detectors to track Compton scattered electrons, and Csl detectors to measure the scattered photon energy and direction. In this work, using Monte-Carlo simulation, we show the improvement that can be obtained when the electron tracking feature is added to a conventional Compton telescope. In simulating a Crab-like source in a balloon-background environment, the flux sensitivity for TIGRE is enhanced by a factor of 2.5 and the source location accuracy by a factor 3 over a non-tracking design. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved  

Using a general relativistic exact model for spherical structures in a cosmological background, we have put forward an algorithm to calculate the test particle geodesics within such cosmological structures in order to obtain the velocity profile of stars or galaxies. The rotation curve thus obtained is based on a density profile and is independent of any mass definition which is not unique in general relativity. It is then shown that this general relativistic rotation curves for a toy model and a NFW density profile are almost identical to the corresponding Newtonian one, although the general relativistic masses may be quite different  

In this research, the main parameters of the multivariate cumulative sum (CUSUM) control chart (the reference value k, the control limit H, the sample size n and the sampling interval h) are determined by minimising the Lorenzen-Vance cost function [Lorenzen, T.J., and Vance, L.C. (1986), The Economic Design of Control Charts: A Unified Approach, Technometrics, 28, 3-10], in which the external costs of employing the chart are added. In addition, the model is statistically constrained to achieve desired in-control and out-of-control average run lengths. The Taguchi loss approach is used to model the problem and a genetic algorithm, for which its main parameters are tuned using the response... 

The harmony search algorithm is one of the latest meta-heuristic algorithms. It benefits from a number of distinguishing features such as a simple concept, few parameters and easy implementation. Combination of web services for inter-enterprise interactions and creation of a composite service which meets users requirements are novel subjects for researches on service oriented systems and process of selecting the best quality based combination is a debatable challenge at this field. In this study an efficient service selection mechanism based on the social harmony search algorithm is proposed to help clients select services with considering the quality attributes. In order to demonstrate the... 

The multivariate exponentially weighted moving average, MEWMA, control chart is an effective statistical tool for detecting small shifts in process mean vectors. On the one hand, the economic design process of a MEWMA control chart involves determining the main parameters of the chart, namely, the sample size n, the sampling interval h, the smoothing constant r, and the control limit L such that a quality cost function is minimized. On the other hand, the statistically constrained economic design of MEWMA chart is to determine the chart parameters such that a cost function is minimized while the statistical performance of the chart is maintained at a desire level. In this paper, the... 

We propose a special solution of Einstein equations in the general Vaidya form representing a dynamical black hole having horizon cross-sections with toroidal topology. The concrete model enables us to study for the first time dynamical horizons with toroidal topology, its area law, and the question of matter flux inside the horizon, without using a cut-and-paste technology to construct the solution  

We have constructed a spherically symmetric structure model in a cosmological background filled with perfect fluid with non-vanishing pressure as an exact solution of the Einstein equations using the LemaѤtre solution. To study its local and quasi-local characteristics, including the novel features of its central black hole, we have suggested an algorithm to integrate the equations numerically. The result shows intriguing effects of the pressure inside the structure. The evolution of the central black hole within the FRW Universe, its decoupling from the expanding parts of the model, the structure of its space-like apparent horizon, the limiting case of the dynamical horizon tending to a... 

The scattering of an oblique plane progressive monochromatic acoustic field upon a laminated composite cylindrical shell is studied based on the three-dimensional exact equations of anisotropic elasticity. Each layer of laminated structure is made of helically filament wound (fiber reinforced) homogeneous material whose degree of anisotropy is considered as monoclinic type. An approximate laminate model along with the local transfer matrix solution is used to solve the state space governing formulation within each layer. Considering the perfect bonding between the adjacent layers, the global transfer matrix is constructed as the product of the local transfer matrices employed to solve for...