Sharif Digital Repository

Nerve repositioning surgery is one of the treatments chosen for the patients with edentulous posterior atrophic mandible. Like any other treatments, this therapy has its advantages and disadvantages, indications and contraindications. The most important complication of this procedure is neurosensory disturbance. This problem may occur at different stages of the treatment. One common time when nerve damage happens is when the nerve is located outside the canal and drilling and insertion of the implant are performed. Accordingly, this report describes a simple and feasible method to retract and protect nerves outside the canal during the treatment of nerve transposition. This will reduce the... 

Nerve repositioning surgery is one of the treatments chosen for the patients with edentulous posterior atrophic mandible. Like any other treatments, this therapy has its advantages and disadvantages, indications and contraindications. The most important complication of this procedure is neurosensory disturbance. This problem may occur at different stages of the treatment. One common time when nerve damage happens is when the nerve is located outside the canal and drilling and insertion of the implant are performed. Accordingly, this report describes a simple and feasible method to retract and protect nerves outside the canal during the treatment of nerve transposition. This will reduce the... 

Passenger cars (PCs) not only are a major contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Iran but also pose severe energy security challenges due to their dependence on gasoline. This study aimed to understand the future trends of the gasoline demand and GHG emissions from PCs in Iran and assess the effectiveness of mitigation policies. The data were collected from multiple sources and used to develop the survival rate function of PCs. The study used back-calculation to compensate for the short period of stock data availability. The use intensity of PCs was estimated based on the gasoline consumption statistics. Econometric models were developed to project the future PC stock and use... 

Passenger cars (PCs) are a major contributor to urban air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy security challenges in megacities in developing countries because of their high growth potential. Since the PC fleet changes through time, the projection of air pollutant emissions from PCs is essential for effective emission reduction policymaking. However, the extensive amount of data and proper models are required for this purpose that are not available in many developing countries. Hence, this study develops multiple econometric and emission models and integrate them into a framework to simulate the future stock and activity of PCs and projects PCs’ air pollutants and CO2 emissions... 

Droplet microfluidics is a platform of microfluidics in which two immiscible fluids are used to generate droplets for various biomedical applications. This platform introduces several advantages in applications such as cell lysis, cell culture, co-culture, and cell encapsulation. The most important issues regarding droplet generation devices are the fabrication complexity and maintenance of these devices. In this study, a simple and easy-to-fabricate microdroplet generator is designed and fabricated to resolve these issues. Furthermore, since this device is easy to fabricate and use, it can play a key role in the fabrication of medical devices for controlling infectious diseases in poor and... 

Application of the colloidal gas aphrons (CGAs) in minimizing formation damage by plugging pore mechanism is now wildly accepted due to numerous successful field experience. One of the pivotal factors which affects the pore blockage ability of micro-bubbles is their stability. This experimental study tries to investigate the possible synergistic effect of nanoparticles on improving the stability and other properties of non-aqueous CGA drilling fluids, in both bulk and porous media. In particular, two types of hydrophobic nanoparticles including silicon dioxide nanopowder coated with 2 wt% Silane and nanoclay, in presence of a treated version of bentonite (Bentone 34) as a stabilizer and... 

Uncertainties can be divided into two general categories: aleatory and epistemic. Conventional reliability-based robust design optimization approaches, which disregard epistemic uncertainties due to lack of knowledge about the physical nature of systems, have previously been developed. To overcome this weakness, unlike previous methods, a Bayesian reliability-based robust design optimization method is proposed in the presence of both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties. The proposed formulation is presented as a multi-objective optimization problem. The univariate dimension reduction method is used to approximate the mean and variance of the design function. The non-dominated sorting... 

Uncertainties can be divided into two general categories: aleatory and epistemic. Conventional reliability-based robust design optimization approaches, which disregard epistemic uncertainties due to lack of knowledge about the physical nature of systems, have previously been developed. To overcome this weakness, unlike previous methods, a Bayesian reliability-based robust design optimization method is proposed in the presence of both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties. The proposed formulation is presented as a multi-objective optimization problem. The univariate dimension reduction method is used to approximate the mean and variance of the design function. The non-dominated sorting... 

Optimized methods for simultaneous removal of nitrate, nitrite and ammonium are important features of nutrient removal. Nitrogen removal efficiency in an intermittently aerated sequencing batch reactor (IA-SBR) with multiple filling events was studied. No external carbon source was added and three filling events were considered. Oxidationreduction potential (ORP) and pH curve at solids retention time (SRT) of 20 d were analyzed. Effects of three organic loading rates (OLR), 0.67, 1.0 and 1.5 kgCOD/m3d, and three nitrogen loading rates (NLR), 0.054, 0.1 and 0.15 kgN/m3d, on nitrogen removal were studied. Nitrate Apex in pH curve and Nitrate Knee in ORP profile indicated that the end of... 

Microbial desalination cell (MDC) is a new bio-electrochemical technique which converts chemical energy into electrical energy, and at the same time desalinates water and treats wastewater. In this study, MDC performance and water biofouling conditions were tested as an efficient pretreatment desalination process of reverse osmosis (RO). The experiments were designed in a three-chamber reactor to compare the performance of batch and continuous fed modes, using bio-cathode and synthetic wastewater in four different hydraulic retention times and 17 and 35 g/L NaCl concentrations. According to the results, maximum salt removal of about 52.3% was obtained in the continuously fed MDC at 35 g/L... 

This study evaluates the effectiveness of adsorption process by Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) compared with a novel formulation of coagulation - flocculation process for dye removal from textile wastewater. In this regard, acidic, reactive, disperse and direct red dye are used to prepare the synthetic dye. Dominant wave length for each dye is determined by spectrophotometeric method. Using GAC as adsorbent, equilibrium time and adsorption isotherm of each dye are determined with aid of spectrophotometric method. The results show that GAC can not remove dispersed red dye. Acidic red, direct red and reactive red of 5 mg/L concentration are removed by GAC up to %90, %88 and %43 in 30, 60 and... 

There is a need to find cheaper and simpler techniques for rural water filtration system in developing countries. Using a filter made of blocks for the water treatment enables one to make vertical filters. It is expected that the amount of land utilized would decrease by more than 70 % if vertical filters were used. The operation and washing would be simpler than using horizontal sand filters as filters made of blocks would be used instead. The feasibility study focused on finding adequate materials, compositions and methods of making a block with enough resistance to water pressure, sufficient porosity for water transformation, and using inexpensive, readily available materials. A pilot... 

This paper presents a formulation for in-plane modal characteristics of non-uniform thickness annular elliptic and circular plates for all classical boundary conditions. The investigations are performed for elastic and isotropic annular elliptic plates on the basis of two- dimensional linear plane stress theory of elasticity. Two-dimensional boundary characteristic orthogonal polynomials (BCOP) are used in the Rayleigh-Ritz method to obtain the natural frequencies and associated mode shapes. The proposed method, not only can find solution for those simple cases of annular circular plates available in literature as a simplified case study, but also it finds some natural frequencies which can... 

SPEED routing algorithm is a service quality based algorithm in which data aggregation dose not happen. In this article, data aggregation has been added to the conventional technique in SPEED algorithm. The idea involves virtual configuration of sensors and specification of an individual ID to the created data by the sensors in each region, then data aggregation in relay node is done by this ID, resulting in less energy consumption, lower traffic and repeated data, an increase in network lifetime and better quality of service. © 2009 IEEE  

Knowing the rate of evaporation from surface water resources such as channels and reservoirs is essential for precise management of the water balance. Few detailed evaporation studies exist for small lakes or reservoirs in arid regions of the world. In this study, monthly evaporation was determined by Bowen Ratio Energy Budget technique (BREB) for Alghadir reservoir (Saveh, Iran) from 1995-2007 and compared with class-A pan. Daily data were obtained from IMO (Iran Meteorological Organization) weather station, located near the reservoir, for all of these years. Some variations have been observed on the estimated evaporation of the energy budget at different years, ranging from 151 cm for 1997... 

Rock formations are always under in situ stresses due to overburden or tectonic stresses. Drilling a well will lead to stress redistribution around the well. Understanding such a stress redistribution, and adopting a proper failure criterion, play a vital role in predicting any potential wellbore failure. However, most of the published analytical models are based on assumptions that do not satisfy the boundary conditions during production, that is, when the well pressure is less than the pore pressure. This paper is aimed at the modeling of the stress regime around the wellbore through combining the poroelastic model with proper boundary conditions under different flow regimes. As a result,... 

Background: A speller system enables disabled people, specifically those with spinal cord injuries, to visually select and spell characters. A problem of primary speller systems is that they are gaze shift dependent. To overcome this problem, a single Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm was initially introduced in which characters are displayed one-by-one at the center of a screen. New method: Two new protocols, Dual and Triple shifted RSVP paradigms, are introduced and compared against the single paradigm. In the Dual and Triple paradigms, two and three characters are displayed at the center of the screen simultaneously, holding the advantage of displaying the target character... 

High molecular mass of naphthalene make it non-biodegradable and the biological methods for treated the pollutant are much time consuming. In this paper, two methods of ozonation and aeration are used to remove naphthalene. Because of the industrial wastewater has a great range of pH, in this study different concentrations of soluble naphthalene are placed in variable pH conditions, different contact times and changes in amount of aeration and ozonation. ANOVA results indicated a significant difference between two methods. The average removal of naphthalene by use of ozonation is 55 % and 37 % for aeration. As results, the best conditions that naphthalene are removed is in acidic environment... 

In this paper, distributions of stress and strain components of rotating disks with non-uniform thickness and material properties subjected to thermo-elastic loading under different boundary conditions are obtained by semi-exact methods of Liao's homotopy analysis method (HAM), Adomian's decomposition method and He's variational iteration method (VIM). The materials are assumed to be perfectly elastic and isotropic. A two dimensional plane stress analysis is used. The distribution of temperature over the disk radius is assumed to have power forms with the higher temperature at the outer surface. The results of the three methods are compared with those obtained by Runge-Kutta's numerical... 

Interactions between P-selectin, expressed on activated endothelium, and its counterpart P-selectin glycoprotein ligand-1 (PSGL-1), expressed on leukocytes, play a pivotal role in adhesive events that recruit circulating leukocytes toward inflamed or injured tissues. Atomistic understanding of the association and dissociation of these bonds under blood flow is necessary to define the underlying mechanism. In this study, steered molecular dynamics (SMD) simulations were applied to investigate the conformational changes of P-LE/SGP-3 construct (an effective binding unit of the P-selectin/PSGL-1 complex) under stretching with constant velocity. In the present simulations, a self-built force...