Sharif Digital Repository

Recently, the topic of bioresorbable metals, with much focus on magnesium for bone implant applications, has been an area of considerable investigation. Indeed, it could be argued that magnesium is the most promising biodegradable material currently being studied for use as an orthopedic skeletal fixation and joint replacement hardware. However, the fast degradation rate of magnesium-based materials in the physiological environment negatively affects their mechanical integrity and hence limits their biomedical use. The most critical conditions may occur when the implant is subjected to a corrosive physiological environment and a fluctuating load during daily activities. Hence, numerous... 

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) provides 2-way communications between the utility and the smart meters. Developing authenticated key exchange (AKE) and broadcast authentication (BA) protocols is essential to provide secure communications in AMI. The security of all existing cryptographic protocols is based on the assumption that secret information is stored in the nonvolatile memories. In the AMI, the attackers can obtain some or all of the stored secret information from memories by a great variety of inexpensive and fast side-channel attacks. Thus, all existing AKE and BA protocols are no longer secure. In this paper, we investigate how to develop secure AKE and BA protocols in the... 

Broadcast encryption is a novel concept for sending a special message to a subset of users. In broadcast encryption schemes, the distribution center broadcasts the message in encrypted form and expect that only the intended users be able to decrypt the message. This concept has several applications such as pay-per-service TVs. In this paper, we investigate one of the most recent broadcast encryption schemes and show that the introduced scheme does not provide the main requirement of broadcast encryption schemes. For this purpose, we demonstrate that all of the users, including authorized and unauthorized users, can decrypt the broadcasted encrypted message. © 2016 IEEE  

Aside from the many services that soil provides, it also stores water and makes it available to crops, which is critical for food security. However, the necessity of further studies for overcoming the existing gap in relation to the role of soil in the water, energy, and food nexus system has been preoccupying the experts and specialists around the world for some time. In this sense, the balance between many key ecosystem components based on the Soil, water, energy, and food (SWEF) nexus framework is one of the key characteristics of holistic and accommodative watershed management systems. To the best of our knowledge, the watershed scale is used as a planning unit for the first time in the... 

Polymer composite films based on chitosan (CS) and nanodimaond (ND) were prepared using solution casting method. ND with variable contents of carboxylic functional group was prepared using thermal oxidation at temperature of 420 °C under air atmosphere at various durations of 1.5 and 4.5 h. The interfacial interaction between NDs and CS and morphological evolution of CS in presence of NDs were investigated by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses. A significant improvement in tensile strength (∼85%) and tensile modulus (∼125%) of CS was achieved by oxidized ND (OND) obtained at higher oxidation time of 4.5 at low... 

Spreading Covid19 has significantly impacted humans' affairs worldwide, either economically or in a sanitary manner. Besides social distance and hospitalization, making and introducing different vaccines help us ameliorate infection and mortality rates. In this research, we use a nonlinear dynamic model for Covid19, with eight states named susceptible, exposed, infected, quarantined, hospitalized, recovered, deceased, and insusceptible populations. Also, we use social distancing, hospitalization, and vaccination rate as three control inputs. This research aims to stop the Covid-19 from spreading worldwide and minimize exposed, infected and deceased populations using model predictive control.... 

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are powerful security primitives that provide cheap and secure solutions for security-related applications. Strong PUFs provide a large set of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) and are suitable for device authentication. Weak PUFs produce a small number of CRPs and can be used for key extraction. In this paper, we propose a novel method to enhance the CRP set of traditional ring oscillator-based PUFs (RO-PUFs). RO-PUFs are one of the most reliable types of PUFs and the best fit to implement on the field-programmable gate arrays. To the best of our knowledge, our method provides the maximum number of CRPs compared with the state of the art. In addition, the... 

Accumulation of amyloid beta (Aβ) soluble forms in the cerebral parenchyma is the mainstream concept underlying memory deficit in the early phase of Alzheimer's disease (AD). PKMζ plays a critical role in the maintenance of long-term memory. Yet, the role of this brain-specific enzyme has not been addressed in AD. We examined the impact of hippocampal PKMζ overexpression on AD-related memory impairment in rats. Oligomeric form of Aβ (oAβ) or vehicle was bilaterally microinjected into the dorsal hippocampus of male Wistar rats under stereotaxic surgery. One week later, 2 μl of lentiviral vector (108 T.U. / ml.) encoding PKMζ genome was microinjected into the dorsal hippocampus. Seven days... 

In this paper with studying of all parameters in grid environment a new scheduling algorithm for independent task is introduced according to Genetic Algorithm. This algorithm can be more efficient and more dependable than similar previous algorithms. The simulated results and reasons for reaching to better makes pan and more efficiency in the grid environment. In the grids with high fault with high fault rate for fault tolerant is used from check point method that has more efficiency that other methods such as retry, migration and replication. This method maintains effective efficiency in these situations. So the servicing quality increases in various grid environments and also the average... 

Nowadays, the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) tomography (TomoSAR) technique plays a notable role in the 3D reconstruction of urban buildings through several SAR acquisitions with slightly different positions. Nonparametric-based TomoSAR spectral estimation algorithms usually work well when a large number of SAR observations. In this study, with a limited number of SAR images, we have assessed the efficiency of the nonparametric spectral estimation methods, including maximum entropy (ME), singular value decomposition (SVD), linear prediction (LP), Capon, minimum norm (MN), and beamforming (BF) in the reconstruction of the third dimension of urban buildings. The experiments are conducted on... 

Four 5-, 10-, 20- and 30-story moment frames, representing low-, mid-, and two high-rise structures, were subjected to a great number of idealized directivity pulses. The amplitudes and periods of pulses vary from 0.02 g to 1.0 g and 0.5 to 12 sec, respectively. Over 1400 nonlinear dynamic analyses of low- to high-rise moment frames were performed which were feasible through using modified fish-bone model. The distribution of interstory drift along the height was studied and two applied contours were proposed: (i) the maximum interstory drift contour, and (ii) the critical story contour. These contours were demonstrated versus the ratio of natural period of the structure to the pulse period... 

In this article singular points of a parallel manipulator are obtained based on a novel geometrical method. Here we introduce the constrained plain method (CPM) and some of its application in parallel mechanism. Given the definition of constraint plane (CP) and infinite constraint plane (ICP) the dependency conditions of constraints is achieved with the use of a new theorem based on the Ceva geometrical theorem. The direction of angular velocity of a body is achieved by having three ICPs with the use of another theorem. Finally, with the use of the above two novel theorems singularities of the 3UPF_PU mechanism are obtained. It should be emphasized that this method is completely geometrical,... 

An analytical model is proposed to study the effect of particle size on melting enthalpy and entropy of metallic nanoparticles (NPs). The Mott's and Regel's equations for melting entropy in the combination of core average coordination number (CAC) and surface average coordination number (SAC) of freestanding NPs are considered. Clusters of icosahedral (IC), body centered cubic (BCC), and body centered tetragonal (BCT) structure without any vacancies and defects are modeled. Using the variable coordination number made this model to be in good agreement with experimental and molecular dynamic (MD) results of different crystal structures. The model predicts melting entropy and enthalpy of... 

Grinding is widely used for manufacturing of components that require fine surface finish and good dimensional accuracy. In this study a thermo-mechanical finite element analysis is conducted to find out how grinding parameters can affect temperature and residual stress distribution in the workpiece. Results of parametric study presented in this work indicate, by carefully selecting the grinding parameters, minimum thermal and mechanical damage can be achieved. Higher workpiece velocities produce higher surface residual stress. By increasing depths of cut, depth of tensile residual stresses increases. Convection heat coefficient does not have any considerable effect on surface residual stress... 

Adaptive Noise Cancellation (ANC) is a well-known technique for background noise reduction in automobile and vehicular environments. The noise fields in automobile and other vehicle interior obey the diffuse noise field model closely. On the other hand, the ANC does not provide sufficient noise reduction in the diffuse noise fields. In this paper, a new multistage post-filter is designed for ANC as a solution to diffuse noise conditions. The designed post-filter is a single channel Linear Prediction (LP) based speech enhancement system. The LP is performed by an adaptive lattice filter and attempts to extract speech components by using intermediate ANC signals. The post-filter has no... 

Shot peening is widely used to improve the fretting fatigue strength of critical surfaces. Fretting fatigue occurs in contacting parts that are subjected to fluctuating loads and sliding movements at the same time. This paper presents a sequential finite element simulation to investigate the shot peening effects on normal stress, shear stress, bulk stress and slip amplitude, which are considered to be the controlling parameters of fretting damage. The results demonstrated that among the modifications related to shot peening, compressive residual stress has a dominant effect on the fretting parameters  

One-dimensional (1D) MgO structures were successfully synthesized via carbothermic reduction of mechanically activated mixture of MgO and graphite. Mechanical activation of source materials before carbothermic reduction can substantially enhance the formation of MgO products at a temperature (1000 °C) relatively lower than that required in previous approaches (≥1200 °C). However, the morphology of MgO formed is dependent on the degree of mechanical activation and the condition of the subsequent carbothermic reduction. Two distinctive morphologies were found for MgO products synthesized using our method: single crystalline nanorods with rectangular cross-sections whose diameters range from 50...