Sharif Digital Repository

In this study power transmission modulation for different fibers in a fiber-to-fiber design using two different light sources is reported. A fiber-to-fiber arrangement is used in which the source light is directly coupled to the first fiber and the second fiber delivers the light to a power meter. Arrangements with three sets of different type fibers are tested in this study and output powers are monitored with the white lamp or red LED as illumination light sources. Using this arrangement the variations of the power as a result of axial (Z-direction) and lateral (X- and Y-direction) displacements of the second fiber are monitored. Theoretical models are also used to evaluate the power... 

With proliferation of single-phase rooftop photovoltaic (PV) panels, phase balancing in low voltage (LV) distribution feeders becomes the point of concern. In this way, identification of the hosting phase of connected single-phase customers and PV panels is a prerequisite. This paper proposes an optimization model for the phase identification problem. The objective is to minimize the summation of the absolute error between estimated and measured variables. Smart meters (SMs) data including active and reactive power absorptions/injections, nodal voltage magnitudes, and network configuration data form the input of the model. Potential errors in the input data are captured in the model while... 

New chemical process design strategies utilizing computer-aided molecular design (CAMD) can provide significant improvements in process safety by designing chemicals with required target properties and the substitution of safer chemicals. An important aspect of this methodology concerns the prediction of properties given the molecular structure. This study utilizes one such emerging method for prediction of a hazardous property, flash point (FP), which is in the center of attention in safety studies. Using such a reliable data set comprising 1651 organic and inorganic chemicals, from 79 diverse material classes, and robust dynamic binary particle swarm optimization for the feature selection... 

The increased penetration of cellular networks has made voice channels widely available ubiquitously. On the other hand, mobile voice channels possess properties that make them an ideal choice for high priority, low-rate real-time communications. Mobile voice channel with the mentioned properties, could be utilised in emergency applications in vehicular communications area such as the standardised emergency call system planned to be launched in 2015. This study aims to investigate the challenges of data transmission through these channels and proposes an efficient data transfer structure. To this end, a proper statistical model for the channel distortion is proposed and an optimum detector... 

In recent years, quantum dots (QDs) have been widely used in upcoming nanotechnology-based solar cells, light-emitting diodes and even bioimaging, due to their tunable optical properties and excellent quantum yields. But, such nanostructures are currently constituted by heavy elements which can threat the human health and living environment. Hence, in this work, the in vivo effects of CdTe nanocrystals (NCs) (as one of the promising QDs) on spermatozoa of male mice and subsequently on fertility of female mice were investigated, for the first time. To do this, CdTe NCs were synthesized through an environment-friendly (aqueous-based solution) method. The sperm cells presented a high potential... 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the fundamental building blocks in measuring and monitoring processes of safety management. This chapter describes a classification of safety KPIs and a review of literature leads to a new framework. It aims to develop a logical selection and aggregation methodology for generating a single number that reflects safety performance. Determining a mechanism for performance measurement and monitoring is a key part of any management system, and this has a higher importance for total safety management. Personal safety deals with the prevention of occupational accidents that usually have low severities and high frequencies. The measurement of safety has been... 

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the fundamental building blocks in measuring and monitoring processes of safety management. This chapter describes a classification of safety KPIs and a review of literature leads to a new framework. It aims to develop a logical selection and aggregation methodology for generating a single number that reflects safety performance. Determining a mechanism for performance measurement and monitoring is a key part of any management system, and this has a higher importance for total safety management. Personal safety deals with the prevention of occupational accidents that usually have low severities and high frequencies. The measurement of safety has been... 

Ciprofloxacin is an alternative to vancomycin for treatment of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections. The objective of this study was to optimization of niosomes encapsulated ciprofloxacin and evaluate their antibacterial and anti-biofilm efficacies against ciprofloxacin-resistant methicillin-resistant S. aureus (CR-MRSA) strains. Formulation of niosomes encapsulated ciprofloxacin were optimized by changing the proportions of Tween 60, Span 60, and cholesterol. The optimized ciprofloxacin encapsulated niosomal formulations based on Span 60 and Tween 60 were prepared and characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and... 

Nanowire arrays of copper oxide were first grown vertically using simple and cost effective thermal oxidation method on a copper foil. Subsequently, in order to deposit and grow PbS nanocyrstalline thin films on CuO NWs by utilizing the chemical bath deposition technique, these arrays were immersed as the substrate in the reaction solution consisting of Pb(NO3)2, (NH2)2CS and NaOH. The final products were characterized in detail by which the formation of uniform, unique arrays of CuO@PbS core–shell NWs was confirmed. Due to the nature of methods employed in synthesis of this hetero structure, the tuning of core and shell size and consequently properties of the novel structure is easily... 

We propose a blind image steganalysis method based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients that are revisited in this work. We compute geometric mean, mean of log values, and statistical moments (mean, variance and skewness) of the SVDs of the DCT sub-blocks that are averaged over the whole image to construct a 480-element feature vector for steganalysis. These features are fed to a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to discriminate between stego and cover images. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms most powerful steganalyzers when applied to some well-known steganography algorithms  

Minimization of the number of cluster heads in a wireless sensor network is a very important problem to reduce channel contention and to improve the efficiency of the algorithm when executed at the level of cluster-heads. In this paper, we propose an efficient method based on genetic algorithms (GAs) to solve a sensor network optimization problem. Long communication distances between sensors and a sink in a sensor network can greatly drain the energy of sensors and reduce the lifetime of a network. By clustering a sensor network into a number of independent clusters using a GA, we can greatly minimize the total communication distance, thus prolonging the network lifetime. Simulation results... 

A great amount of effort has been made in order to reach a more precise understanding of the adhesion phenomenon that happens as a vital component of several biological systems. Therefore, a firm understanding of the important factors that influence this phenomenon is of special importance in triggering the adhesive characteristics of different biological, bio-inspired and synthetic materials in fields such as tissue engineering. In this study the adhesive characteristics of a multi-material system consisting of the frequently used synthetic material, graphene, in the form of armchair-configuration sheets, and an important biological filament which is type 1 Collagen consisting of 3 alpha... 

Wet cooling towers are one of the most water-intensive technologies, which are widely used in air conditioning applications, especially in dry regions. Considering the current water crisis around the world, it is essential to improve the design of these cooling towers to reduce their water consumption, while maintaining their cooling performance. Makeup water of cooling tower is usually a constant-temperature water which is cold enough to condensate the moisture content of the cooling tower exhaust air. Therefore, it has great potential to recycle water evaporation of cooling towers, which is not considered so far. This paper investigates a novel design for cooling towers utilising the...