Sharif Digital Repository

In recent years the rapid rise of polymer consumption especially in the form of packaging materials became a real menace for the environment. Polyolefin are some of the most dominant packaging materials and responsible by part of the problems in the disposal of one-trip packaging. One of the possible ways of solving this problem is the introduction of additives increasing their susceptibility to environmental degradation into non-biodegradable polymers. One such additive is starch- the natural, cheap, and easily biodegradable polymer. Starch was already used as a filler or as a blend with polyolefin. Addition of dry starch granules to polyolefin follows the general trend of filler effects on... 

Trust is a common concept in interpersonal relationships. It is a replacement for strict control mechanisms, helping individuals to have a better estimation of the risks involved in an interaction or relationship. Computational notions of trust have a close relationship with security in computer systems.Different models of trust have been proposed to regulate interactions in: security, collaborative systems, and routing. We focused on two important problems and challenges in this dissertation: proper handling of uncertainty, and uncertainty-aware trust-based decision-making.We propose an integrated approach to modeling, processing, and treating uncertainty, as well as to uncertainty-aware... 

Resource sharing is the most important feature of a Grid. Resource discovery enables users to find the most suitable resources to run Grid jobs on. Resource discovery systems are often centralized or hierarchical. These structures are usually prone to a single point of failure, and unbalanced distribution of processing and storage load, making them inefficient as the Grid grows. These challenges have led researchers to adapt distributed approaches, such as Peer-to-Peer file sharing solutions. The important differences between Grid resource discovery and P2P file discovery (e.g. different resource attributes, queries, change patterns etc.) make it difficult to port the existing solutions to... 

A large number of structures and substructures, such as piles, have damaged or even yielded the entire structure during seismic loading. The kinematic interaction of piles under seismic loading has been widely studied from analytical, experimental, and numerical perspectives. In numerical modeling, most existing literature relies on simplified approaches to describe the soil-pile interaction, which leads to the need for more reliable and comprehensive research. In this research, the seismic response of the soil-pile system was investigated through a fully nonlinear three-dimensional numerical analysis in the time domain using the FLAC3D program. This model simulates the dependence of soil... 

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cancer cells which shed from the primary tumor, enter circulation and spread cancer all over the body. CTCs give valuable information about cancer and can help diagnosis and prognosis. Hence separating and isolating CTCs from blood is a necessity for cancer therapeutics. CTCs are separated from blood cells by their different physical or biochemical properties. Many groups have attempted different methods for separation of CTCs. Inertial microfluidics is one of the newest approaches in CTC separation technologies which separates CTCs based on their size. Current inertial microfluidic systems containing straight, spiral, serpentine and contraction expansion... 

The conversion of CO2 gas into value-add chemicals known as solar fuel technology attracted much consideration from the beginning of the 21st century owing to the potential of this technology in solving the climate change and energy shortage issues. In the present study, a well-known photocatalyst, TiO2, was doped with Bismuth element and was subjected to Pt nanoparticles loading as a cocatalyst to boost the photocatalytic CO2 conversion. Pristine TiO2 and Bi-doped samples were prepared by sol gel method. Then, a facile photo-deposition method was employed to introduce Pt onto the surface of TiO2. Various characterization techniques including XRD, DRS, BET, PL, FTIR, FESEM and TEM, were used... 

The aim of this project is to investigate and synthesize CaO-based nanocatalysts derived from chicken eggshell calcination with alkali metals and sodium-potassium compounds promoters used in the transesterification reaction of canola oil and methanol. Sections of this thesis include the synthesis of nanocatalysts, catalyst characterization tests, and investigation of reaction under optimal conditions. Two groups of catalysts containing different weight percentages of alkali metals based on CaO and 1 %wt sodium-potassium based on CaO with different weight percentages of these two elements were synthesized by wet impregnation method and used in the reaction under optimum condition. Catalyst... 

Due to the increasing consumption of fuel, the use of new methods with high efficiency to remove sulfur from fossil fuels is felt more than ever. Hydrogenation and oxidation of sulfur organic matter, such as thiophenes, is an old method of desulfurization of liquid fuels. Using a photocatalyst, everything can be done in an environment that is very low cost. In this study, the photocatalytic elimination of dibenzothiophene was investigated. For this purpose, carbon-doped thiamine dioxide was used as the photocatalytic base, which is synthesized by hydrothermal method. This method is the same source of titanium and carbon. To increase the performance of the catalyst, platinum metal was loaded... 

During the last few decades, efforts have been made to replace fossil fuels with clean and non-absorbent energy sources. One of the promising strategies is energy production by hydrogen storage using water splitting. For this purpose, different methods of using light, heat and electricity are provided. Electrolysis of water with a simple environment such as very high purity of hydrogen produced, controllable, device, no need for high temperature and pressure in the reactor and huge potential for industrial applications has been very much considered. Water electrolysis consists of two reactions: reduction of water to hydrogen (HER) and oxidation of water to oxygen (OER). The second reaction... 

In recent decades, desulfurization processes have become necessary to reduce environmental pollution due to fuel sulfur emissions. In this research, in order to photocatalytic oxidation desulfurization of liquid fuel, a model fuel (normal octane) under visible light irradiation of 250 W sodium lamp, using H2O2 oxidant and methanol solvent in the presence of BMO/Fe@MIL(x%) composite. BMO and Fe@MIL were investigated. From the tests, X-ray diffraction, scanning and transmission electron microscope imaging, absorption and desorption of nitrogen gas, infrared spectrometer-Fourier transform, visible-ultraviolet reflection spectroscopy, optical radiation spectroscopy and vibration magnetometer in...