Sharif Digital Repository

The leaching kinetics of stibnite in basic solution has been investigated. Spherical pellets of antimony sulphide were dissolved in 1 molar sodium hydroxide solutions at different temperatures. It was found that the shrinking core with ash layer model could satisfactorily explain the dissolution process. Using this model, it was found that initially the rate controlling step was a chemical reaction with activation energy of 10.2 kJ/mol. As the ash layer built up, diffusion through the ash layer became the rate controlling step. The activation energy for this step was found to be 33.4 kJ/mol. It was also observed that smaller particle size, larger solid to liquid ratio, and higher NaOH... 

A novel hydrogen sulfide microbial biosensor was developed based on investigating the influence of four design parameters: cell concentration, immobilization bed type, hydrogen sulfide concentration, and geometrical shape of the biosensor. Thiobacillus thioparus was used as the recognition element and it was immobilized on sodium alginate as well as agarose bed. The results were optimized by the application of statistical optimization software based on response time of the system. Oxygen reduction was considered as the detection sign. Sodium alginate solution with a concentration of 2.3% (w/v) and optical density of 10 at 605. nm was found as the optimum conditions for immobilization with... 

Isolation and characterization of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) found in blood samples of cancer patients have been considered as a reliable source for cancer prognosis and diagnosis. A new continuous microfluidic platform has been designed in this investigation for simultaneous capture and characterization of CTCs based on their deformability. The deformability-based chip (D-Chip) consists of two sections of separation and characterization where slanted weirs with a gap of 7 μm were considered. Although sometimes CTCs and leukocytes have the same size, the deformability differs in such a way that can be exploited for enrichment purposes. MCF7 and MDA-MB-231 cell lines were used for the... 

This research study presents an experimental investigation on forced convection heat transfer of an aqueous ferrofluid flow passing through a circular copper tube in the presence of an alternating magnetic field. The flow passes through the tube under a uniform heat flux and laminar flow conditions. The primary objective was to intensify the particle migration and disturbance of the boundary layer by utilizing the magnetic field effect on the nanoparticles for more heat transfer enhancement. Complicated convection regimes caused by interactions between magnetic nanoparticles under various conditions were studied. The process of heat transfer was examined with different volume concentrations... 

In this study, a novel experimental approach was used to overcome the lack of phase equilibrium information to obtain data that is more applicable to industrial situations. Liquid-liquid equilibrium (LLE) data, tie-lines, and phase boundaries were carried out for two systems of canola oil methyl esters (containing 1 wt % KOH) + glycerol + methanol and sunflower oil methyl esters (containing 1 wt % KOH) + glycerol + methanol at three different temperatures (303.15, 313.15, and 323.15 K). The quality of data was also ascertained using Othmer-Tobias correlations. The experimental LLE data was also correlated by the nonrandom two-liquid (NRTL) and the Wilson-NRF Gibbs free energy models. The... 

In this research, organic solvent composed of hexane and methanol was used for lipid extraction from dry and wet biomass of Chlorella vulgaris. The results indicated that lipid and fatty acid extraction yield was decreased by increasing the moisture content of biomass. However, the maximum extraction efficiency was attained by applying equivolume mixture of hexane and methanol for both dry and wet biomass. Thermodynamic modeling was employed to estimate the effect of hexane/methanol ratio and moisture content on fatty acid extraction yield. Hansen solubility parameter was used in adjusting the interaction parameters of the model, which led to decrease the number of tuning parameters from 6... 

The solar collectors have been commonly used in desalination systems. Recent investigations show that the use of a linear parabolic through collector in solar stills can improve the efficiency of a desalination system. In this work, a combination of a heat pipe and a twin-glass evacuated tube collector is utilized with a parabolic through collector. Results show that the rate of production and efficiency can reach to 0.27 kg/(m2 h) and 22.1% when aluminum conducting foils are used in the space between the heat pipe and the twin-glass evacuated tube collector to transfer heat from the tube collector to the heat pipe. When oil is used as a medium for the transfer of heat, filling the space... 

In this study, the liquid-liquid phase behavior of aromatic compound. +. aliphatic compound. +. ionic liquid (IL) ternary systems was estimated by using two artificial neural networks (ANN) developed based on back propagation (BP) and hybrid group method of data handling (GMDH). Molar ratio of aliphatic compound, aromatic compound, and IL as well as temperature, molecular weight ratio of aliphatic compound to IL, and molecular weight ratio of aromatic compound to IL were chosen as the inputs to the networks. Additionally, the mole fraction of components in final alkane-rich phase and IL-rich phase was considered as desired outputs. The best topology of the BP-ANN model was found as (6-8-4).... 

Cancer has long been a leading cause of death. The primary tumor, however, is not the main cause of death in more than 90% of cases. It is the complex process of metastasis that makes cancer deadly. The invasion metastasis cascade is the multi-step biological process of cancer cell dissemination to distant organ sites and adaptation to the new microenvironment site. Unraveling the metastasis process can provide great insight into cancer death prevention or even treatment. Microfluidics is a promising platform, that provides a wide range of applications in metastasis-related investigations. Cell culture microfluidic technologies for in vitro modeling of cancer tissues with fluid flow and the... 

To mitigate environmental pollution and food contamination caused by inappropriate and excessive herbicide usage, most potent herbicides should be screened to control rice weeds. A research trial was executed for assessing the comparative efficacy of different herbicides to control rice field weeds and to evaluate the toxicity on rice under normal (distilled water) as well as different salinity levels (4 and 8 dS m-1). The study was designed to select the most potent herbicide and its appropriate dose for weed control of rice crop in coastal areas. Fourteen herbicidal treatments were included weed free crop, Pretilachlor (0.25, 0.50, 0.375 and 0.75 kg a.i. ha-1), Propanil + Thiobencarb (0.6... 

Using multiple antennas at the transmit and receive sides of a passive radar brings both the benefits of MIMO radar and passive radar. However one of the obstacles arisen in such configuration is the receive antennas placement in proper positions so that the radar performance is improved. Here we just consider the case of positioning one receiver among multiple illuminators of opportunity. Indeed it is a start for the solution of optimizing the geometry of the multiple receivers in a passive radar  

SbCl3 supported on montmorillonite K-10 is an efficient catalyst for the ring opening of epoxides with aromatic amines under solvent-free conditions and microwave irradiation to give the corresponding b-amino alcohols in high yields with high regioselectivity  

One of the important obstacles in MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) radars is the issue of designing proper transmit signals. Indeed, the capability of signal design is a significant advantage in MIMO radars, through which, the system can achieve much better performance. Many different aspects of this performance improvement have been considered yet, and the transmit signals have been designed to attain such goal, e.g., getting higher SNR or better detector's performance at the receiver. However, an important tool for evaluating the radar's performance is its ambiguity function. In this paper, we consider the problem of transmit signal design, in order to optimize the ambiguity function... 

Two gains play key roles in recently developed MIMO wireless communication systems: "spatial diversity" gain and "spatial multiplexing" gain. The diversity gain refers to the capability to decrease the error rate of the MIMO channel, while the multiplexing gain implicitly refers to the amount of increase in the capacity of the MIMO channel. It has been shown that there is a fundamental tradeoff between these two types of gains, meaning interplay between increasing reliability (via an increase in the diversity gain) and increasing data rate (via an increase in the multiplexing gain). On the other hand, recently, MIMO radars have attracted much attention for their superior ability to enhance... 

It is a well known fact that using multiple antennas at transmit and receive sides improves the detection performance. However, in such multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configuration, proper positioning of transmitters and receivers is a big challenge that can have significant influence on the performance of the overall system. In addition, determining the power of each transmitter under a total power constraint is a problem that should be solved in order to enhance the performance and coverage of such a system. In this paper, we design the Neyman-Pearson detector under the Rayleigh scatter model and use it to introduce a criterion for the antenna placement at both transmit and receive...