Sharif Digital Repository

DNA is big protein molecule consisting of two strands intertwining each others. Recently DNA molecule has drawn attention of researchers to be used in electronic circuits and molecule electronic field. Therefore, many experiments have been carried out to measure DNA conductivity in different temperature in single molecule or bundle mode with varying size and shape. In this thesis, metallic bundle DNA at normal room temperature is studied and their resistance characteristic is obtained and compared. In order to improve DNA conductivity Metal Ions like zinc are adulterated to each of its structure period. DNAs with these metallic impurities are called metallic DNAs.
Thus, golden electrodes... 

Most elderly and physically disabled people suffer from lack of functionality and dexterity in their elbow or wrist. These disabilities are due to the damages mostly caused by sport surgery, spinal surgery, or stroke. Therefore, design of an assistive exoskeleton robot for upper limb movements seems necessary. The purpose of this study is to design, fabricate and deliver a control algorithm for an assistive wearable robot. The robot has two degrees of freedom in order to help the flexion/extension of elbow and wrist. Furthermore, various kinds of control systems incorporated in rehabilitation robots are investigated and their advantages and drawbacks are compared. Then, some conventional... 

This paper develops a novel insight and procedure that includes a variety of algorithms for finding the best solution in a structured multi-agent system with internal communications and a global purpose. In other words, it finds the optimal communication structure among agents and the optimal policy in this structure. First, a unique reinforcement learning algorithm is proposed to find the optimal policy of each agent in a fixed structure with non-linear function approximation like artificial neural networks (ANN) and eligibility traces. Secondly, a mechanism is presented to perform self-organization based on the information of the learned policy. Finally, an algorithm that can discover an... 

A variety of early universe models predict the formation of primordial black holes. Primordial black holes can be a candidate for a fraction or total dark matter in the universe. Moreover, mergers of these black holes can produce gravitational waves. After re-entering the horizon, having a sufficiently large amplitude, the initial fluctuations of cosmic matter can collapse to primordial black holes. This thesis studies an inflationary potential that can amplify the power spectrum of curvature perturbations up to several orders of magnitude via imposing some features on the potential. This power amplification on small scales can lead to the formation of primordial black holes. For simplicity,... 

Decision making for planning a petrochemical plant is a difficult task, particularly when decisions are required to be made under constraints and different objectives. Final purpose of current research is to develop a reliable model for selecting limited petrochimal products among all potential alternatives under different constraints, considering two desired objective functions; Maximizing economic gain and minimizing safety risk. The powerful tool of multi objective decision making has been used for solving the proposed model. The developed model has been applied to Jam Petrochemical Company as a case study and the acquired results found to be successful.

 

Storage of the spent nuclear fuels is one of the topics of interest in recent years and many researches have been conducted in this field in order to design storage casks for spent nuclear fuels. In this study, thermal-hydraulic analysis of a dry storage cask for Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant spent nuclear fuels is carried out. Geometry of the analyzed cask is taken from a Russian transportation cask TK-13. Drawing of the geometry is achieved with SolidWorks and it’s meshing is completed in Gambit. 3 different cases were considered for cask’s geometry and design: cask without spacers inside, cask with spacers inside, and cask with spacers inside and fins on the outside surface of the cask.... 

Nowadays environmental issues are of great importance and one of the most paramount issues is the quality of water, because clean water is vital to our existence. Besides different methods for water purification, water quality testing is a useful and needful tool. Traditional methods for determination of water quality parameters are mainly expensive, time consuming and require highly trained staff. In this study, we have described a centrifugal microfluidic platform (Lab- on – a- CD) for simultaneous determination of different physical and chemical parameters including Nitrite, Free Chlorine and pH. All of the processes from sample injection to detection are integrated on this low-cost and... 

Nowadays, cancer, which has been mentioned as the disease of the century, is the second leading cause of death throughout the world, and its incidence is constantly increasing. Isolation of circulating tumor cells is one of the most critical steps in diagnosing and controlling cancer progression. Due to the rarity of cancer cells compared to other cells in the blood sample, the isolation process requires optimal and high-precision devices. With the advent of inertial microfluidics, the ability to control the particles movement, the processing of blood samples as quickly and accurately as possible, and the viability of cells with a high percentage, introduced microfluidic systems as a... 

In the present investigation, the mechanical alloying (MA) technique was employed to produce nanocrystalline Al-Ti alloys. Elemental Al and Ti powders were mixed with different compositions (0, 5, 10, and 20 wt.% Ti) and then, milled in a planetary ball-mill up to 40 h. The variations of powder morphology and particle size, apparent and tap densities, microstructure, grain size, lattice strain, and microhardness were studied with increasing the milling time. While dissolution of Ti in the Al matrix resulted to the formation of supersaturated Al-Ti solid solution in the samples containing 5 and 10 wt.% Ti, the specimen with 20 wt.% Ti, eventually, led to nanocomposite powder with different... 

In this thesis, a new passive method suitable for Geolocating LPI radars is introduced. The method uses two Electronic Support (ES) receivers placed on a fast moving platform (e.g., an airplane or a satellite). The proposed method has a high processing gain, which makes it highly suitable for very weak LPI signals. The processing gain of the method was analytically derived and illustrated with simulation to determine if the proposed method can detect LPI radars in much lower SNRs compared to regular time-frequency LPI detection methods. Also, the resolution of the proposed method in both range and cross-range direction in radar location finding was analyzed. Furthurmore, the effect of the... 

The prediction of deposition efficiency of submicron particles in the pulmonary alveoli has received special attention due to its importance for drug delivery systems, and for assessing air pollutants health risks. In this work, the pulmonary alveoli of a healthy human are idealized by a three dimensional honeycomb like configuration and a fluid-structure interaction analysis is performed to study the normal cyclic breathing hydrodynamics. A viscoelastic model is used for the mechanical behavior of alveolar wall tissue. In contrast to previous works in which the inlet flow rate is predefined, in this model a negative pressure is imposed on the outside surface of the alveolus which causes air... 

An acinus is defined as the complex of airways supplied by one first order respiratory or transitional bronchiole. In this part, the replenishment of oxygen at the alveolar surface occurs by a combination of convective air flow with diffusion of oxygen in the air. So for studying gas exchange in the lung, modeling gas species transport and exchange in an acinus is important. Due to lacking direct measurements of the distribution of oxygen (or carbon dioxide) concentration in the acinus, several mathematical models have been developed and studied by numerical simulations. But in none of them the influence of breathing pattern and the role of blood flow in restricting the gas exchange rate have... 

In this thesis, cavitating flow over 2D/3D geometries of cavitators and projectile bodies in stationary and moving conditions are simulated using the "Volume of Fluid" (VOF) technique. The main application of VOF model is for simulating free surface flows. In this work, another capability is added to the VOF algorithm to solve for gas phase and by applying analytical-numerical mass transfer models, cavitation phenomenon is simulated. The developed algorithm precisely simulates the geometrical parameters of supercavities such as dimension and shape in a wide range of cavitation numbers. In addition, the flow parameters of supercavity such as drag coefficient, pressure coefficient inside the... 

Planing crafts in waves are characterized by large and violent vertical motion and acceleration. The hull structure is subjected to high impact loads and the crew experiences high transient vertical acceleration and in most cases the crew needs to lower speed in order to avoid damage to the hull.In recent years, interest on increasingly faster marine vehicles has remarkably grown. Typical planing monohulls are: patrol vessels, pilot boats, rescue vessels, coast guard vessels and small navy vessels. So the behavior of planing monohulls in waves has been a widely researched topic since more and more planing monohulls appeared.The accurate prediction of large amplitude ship motions in severe... 

In this thesis, the potential flow including unsteady partial cavitation around axisymmetric bodies are studied using a boundary element method (BEM) based on potential theory. For this purpose the wetted surface of the body and cavity surface are divided (approximated) to panels. Then, by applying the Green’s third identity and expressing this theory in potential flow around every surface, cavitation can be modeled by distributing the source and the dipole rings on cavity/body surface. In order to approaching this goal we introduced dipole rings distribution on the cavity and body surfaces and source rings distribution on the cavity surface. In this work the cavitation number is assumed to... 

The present study examines both Direct Current (DC) and Alternating Current (AC) electroosmotic flows in a parallel plate microchannel. The method consists of a central finite difference scheme for spatial terms and a forward difference scheme for the temporal term. Asymmetric boundary conditions are assumed for Poison-Boltzmann equation used to determine the electric double layer (EDL) potential distribution. The potential distribution is then used to evaluate the velocity distribution for both DC and AC electroosmotic flows. The velocity distributions are obtained by applying slip boundary conditions on the walls to account for probable hydrophobicity of the surfaces. After determining the... 

Reduction ships resistance is the major issues that always been about moving the ship into a water. In the course of research, many scientists have been interest to resistance reduction. It is important protect the body of ship against damage caused by sticking marine algae and crustaceans as protection against corrosive agents. Marine organisms such as algae, crustaceans and bacteria stick on submerged surfaces and increase the ship resistance. In this thesis resistance reduction using coating is evaluated. Foul release paint make smooth surface and low surface energy therefore ship with foul release coating experience lower drag contrast ship with another coating in the unfouled condition.... 

In positioning and navigation, Sonar with utilization of sound waves in water environments is similar to the role of Radar in not watered (irrigated) environments. In the Sonar field, modeling and simulation of propagation of sound waves in the undersea environment is a fundamental and very important topic. Nowadays simulation is significant tool that allow to the researchers to predict the quality of Sonar function respect to the experimental conditions. For simulation and modeling of sound wave propagation are used two different methods; Wave theory and Ray theory. In the wave theory, because of the large volume of data, the interpretation of the results is hard. Also in this method cannot... 

Atherosclerosis is one of the most important and common causes of death in the world. Atherosclerosis typically affects medium and large arteries in the body and it leads to plaque formation in arterial wall. The first stage of plaque formation has been related to accumulation of low density lipoproteins in arterial wall.
The purpose of this research is presenting a four-layer model to describe the LDL transport in the arterial wall. The endothelium, intima, internal elastic lamina (IEL) and media are all treated as macroscopically homogeneous porous media and the volume-averaged porous media equations are employed to model various layers. The physiological parameters within the various...