Sharif Digital Repository

A destabilizing effect at pH 7 of sodium phosphate on several lipases immobilized via interfacial activation is shown in this work. This paper investigates if this destabilizing effect is extended to other inactivation conditions, immobilization protocols or even other immobilized enzymes (ficin, trypsin, β-galactosidase, β-glucosidase, laccase, glucose oxidase and catalase). As lipases, those from Candida antarctica (A and B), Candida rugosa and Rhizomucor miehei have been used. Results confirm the very negative effect of 100 mM sodium phosphate at pH 7.0 for the stability of all studied lipases immobilized on octyl agarose, while using glutaraldehyde-support the effect is smaller (still... 

In analysing the structural organization of a social network, identifying important nodes has been a fundamental problem. The concept of network centrality deals with the assessment of the relative importance of a particular node within the network. Most of the traditional network centrality definitions have a high computational cost and require full knowledge of network topological structure. On the one hand, in many applications we are only interested in detecting the top-k central nodes of the network with the largest values considering a specific centrality metric. On the other hand, it is not feasible to efficiently identify central nodes in a large real-world social network via... 

Curcumin incorporated polyurethanes (CPU) are gaining much attention as a biomaterial. However, challenges are still remained due to hydrophobicity and low mechanical strength of CPU. Herein, we synthesized the CPU/ZnO nanocomposites with good mechanical and improved hydrophilic properties via in-situ polymerization. A series of curcumin incorporated polyurethane with different concentrations of ZnO nanoparticles (ZnCPU) are synthesized by using the curcumin, polyethylene glycol (PEG) as the soft segment, hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI) as the hard segment, and 1,4-butanediol (BDO) as the chain extender. The addition of ZnO nanoparticles (NPs) facilitated the soft domain of PU which is... 

TiO2 nanorods have been successfully grown into a track-etched polycarbonate (PC) membrane by a particulate sol-electrophoretic deposition from an aqueous medium. The prepared sols had a narrow particle size distribution around 17 nm and excellent stability against aging, with zeta potentials in the range of 47-50 mV at pH 2. It was found that TiO2 nanorods were grown from dilute aqueous sol with a low, 0.1-M concentration. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) analysis confirmed that a full conversion of titanium isopropoxide was obtained by hydrolysis, resulting in the formation of TiO2 particles. X-ray diffraction (XRD) results revealed that TiO2 nanorods dried at 100 °C were a... 

Fluxgate magnetometers with different design and core materials have been made. The sensors have been characterized and the frequency responses of the sensors have been measured. The fluxgate magnetometer based on orthogonal design and amorphous wire core working in fundamental mode reaches 30pT/Hz noise level and 40μV/nT sensitivity. Finally an active magnetic shield constructed based on the amorphous core fluxgate magnetometer reaches more than 60dB field attenuation for DC field and has a good response for frequencies below 100Hz  

The presence of cracks in a structure can considerably affect its behaviour. This paper presents a finite element study on the vibration, buckling and dynamic stability behaviour of a cracked cylindrical shell with fixed supports and subject to an in plane compressive/tensile periodic edge load. The effects of crack length and orientation are analysed. Under tension load, the results show that the frequency of the shell initially increases with the load, but then decreases as the load further increases leading to buckling due to tension load. The size and the orientation of the crack and the loading parameter can all have a significant effect on the dynamic stability behaviour of the shell... 

Low cost dispersed supported cobalt oxide nanocatalysts on activated carbon (AC) were prepared by two different methods: (1) combined impregnation and deposition–precipitation (IMP-DP) and (2) heterogeneous deposition–precipitation (HDP). XRD, TEM, FESEM, BET and Boehm techniques were used for the characterization of the support and the catalysts. Characterization analyses indicated the negative effect of the wet impregnation method on the IMP-DP technique for the preparation of catalysts for the total oxidation of cyclohexane in air. The catalysts prepared by HDP and IMP-DP methods were found to have significant differences in oxidation activity, morphology, particle size, and shape of... 

Copper and cobalt oxides supported on almond shell derived activated carbon (AC) with different loadings were synthesized by sequential and co-deposition-precipitation methods leading to Cu(shell)/Co(core)/AC, Co(shell)/Cu(core)/AC and Cu-Co(mixed)/AC catalysts that were subsequently used for catalytic oxidation of gaseous mixtures of toluene and cyclohexane in air in a tubular flow reactor. The catalysts and the support were characterized by Boehm test, Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area, X-ray diffraction (XRD), field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy... 

Thermal cracking of a vacuum distillation residue of the Abadan refinery in Iran was performed under delayed coking conditions to investigate the effect of operating conditions on the yield and sulfur content of products. At reaction temperatures of 440-500 °C and pressures of 1, 3, and 5 bar, the products included gases, liquids, and coke. The yields of liquid products were higher at 1 bar compared to those for higher pressures. Increasing the reaction temperature at a given reaction pressure led to an increase in the yield of liquid products. Increasing the reaction pressure at a given reaction temperature led to higher yields of coke and gases as well as a decrease in the sulfur content... 

Abstract: The effect of annealing temperature on the properties of silver thin films has been investigated. Ag thin films have been deposited on glass substrates by electron beam coating, afterward subjected to annealing in a mixed ambient of air and oxygen at 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500°C for 3 h and then cooled slowly. The crystallographic structures of the Ag thin films were studied as a function of the annealing temperature. X‑ray diffraction (XRD) was used to estimate the crystallographic texture and grain size. All the films were found to have crystalline structure. The film microstructures were studied by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The XRD and SEM results confirmed the... 

This paper presents UOWD-Sharif team's approach for XML information retrieval. This approach is an extension of PLIR which is an experimental knowledge-based information retrieval system. This system like PLIR utilizes plausible inferences to first infer the relevance of sentences in XML documents and then propagates the relevance to the other textual units in the document tree. Two approaches have been used for propagation of confidence. The first approach labeled "propagate-DS" first propagates the confidence from sentences to upper elements and then combines these evidences by applying Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence to estimate the confidence in that element. The second approach... 

High-quality measurements of seismic activities around the world provide a wealth of data and information that are relevant to understanding of when earthquakes may occur. If viewed as complex stochastic time series, such data may be analyzed by methods that provide deeper insights into their nature, hence leading to better understanding of the data and their possible implications for earthquakes. In this paper, we provide further evidence for our recent proposal for the existence of a transition in the shape of the probability density function (PDF) of the successive detrended increments of the stochastic fluctuations of Earth's vertical velocity Vz, collected by broadband stations before... 

Nonlinear propagation has been demonstrated to have a significant impact on ultrasound imaging. An efficient computational algorithm is presented to simulate nonlinear ultrasound propagation through layered liquid and tissue-equivalent media. Results are compared with hydrophone measurements. This study was undertaken to investigate the role of nonlinear propagation in high frequency ultrasound micro-imaging. The acoustic field of a focused transducer (20 MHz centre frequency, f-number 2.5) was simulated for layered media consisting of water and tissue-mimicking phantom, for several wide-bandwidth source pulses. The simulation model accounted for the effects of diffraction, attenuation and... 

This article is focused on the application of 'Continuous Descent Approach' [CDA] to reduce the overall terminal traffic wastage of time and fuel consumption as well as reducing environmental emissions. This goal is achieved by introducing an online alternative CDA route under management of a heuristic optimization algorithm that minimizes the overall holding time. Performing a study on Atlanta international Hartsfield-Jackson airport, ATL, the results show considerable 60% decrease in cost function. Such achievement encourages the idea of implementing 'Dynamic CDA Routing Algorithm' [DCRA]  

In this paper we introduce two adaptive power control algorithms for downlink of underwater wireless optical cellular networks. The first approach is based on the angle of user's position with respect to optical base transceiver station (OBTS) of the cell. The second scheme works according to the link distance between the user and the OBTS. Defining an optimization problem, we aim to guaranty the quality of service for each user while minimizing the transmitting power. In our methods, we utilize limited feedback channel state information (CSI) so that the algorithm could be implemented with low complexity. The simulation results for different water types demonstrate that our proposed... 

In this paper, we consider a wireless cooperative network with a wireless-powered energy harvesting (EH) relay. The relay employs a time switching (TS) policy that switches between the EH and data decoding (DD) modes. Both energy and data buffers are kept at the relay to store the harvested energy and decoded data packets, respectively. In this paper, we derive static and dynamic TS policies that maximize the system throughput or minimize the average transmission delay. In particular, in the static policies, the EH or DD mode is selected with a pre-determined probability. In contrast, in a dynamic policy, the mode is selected dynamically according to the states of data and energy buffers. We... 

Bitcoin as the current leader in cryptocurrencies is a new asset class receiving significant attention in the financial and investment community and presents an interesting time series prediction problem. In this paper, some forecasting models based on classical like ARIMA and machine learning approaches including Kriging, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Bayesian method, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) are proposed and analyzed for modelling and forecasting the Bitcoin price. While some of the proposed models are univariate, the other models are multivariate and as a result, the maximum, minimum and the opening daily price of Bitcoin are also used in these models. The... 

The report on square ice sandwiched between two graphene layers by Algara-Siller et al. [Nature (London) 519, 443 (2015)NATUAS0028-083610.1038/nature14295] has generated a large interest in this system. By applying high lateral pressure on nanoconfined water, we found that monolayer ice is transformed to bilayer ice when the two graphene layers are separated by H=6,7 Å. It was also found that three layers of a denser phase of ice with smaller lattice constant are formed if we start from bilayer ice and apply a lateral pressure of about 0.7 GPa with H=8,9 Å. The lattice constant (2.5-2.6 Å) in both transitions is found to be smaller than those typical for the known phases of ice and water,... 

This research explored the influences of shielding gases on the appearance of weld beads and the microstructures and mechanical properties of thin-wall samples using conventional gas metal arc welding as the heat source by using 5356 aluminium alloy welding wire as the raw materials and nitrogen (N2) and argon (Ar) as the shielding gases. The results showed that under the same parameters and after mono-layer single-bead welding was performed using N2 as the shielding gas, the bead height was higher, the bead width was narrower, and the penetration depth was shallower. The grain size of the thin-wall sample protected by N2 was 43.5–47.8 % smaller than that obtained under Ar protection.... 

The noise level of the magnetometer and gradiometer RF SQUIDs were investigated using different shielding methods. The used methods include different active and passive shielding, such as Helmholtz configurations, locally compensation coils, superconducting bulks and μ-metal shields. For the passive shielding approach, using FEM simulation we have investigated the shielding effectiveness of superconducting bulks versus the use of μ-metal shielding. The superconducting shield is a YBCO circular bulk, which was made using melt-texture method and located in a distance in front of the SQUID. In this work the results of these shielding methods are presented and compared, while their effectiveness...