Sharif Digital Repository

In this paper, a dynamic-hybrid automatic repeat request (D-HARQ) scheme with guaranteed delay performance is proposed. As opposed to the conventional HARQ that the maximum number of re-transmissions, L, is fixed, in the proposed scheme packets can be re-transmitted more times given that the previous packet was received with less than L re-transmissions. The dynamic of the proposed scheme is analyzed using the Markov model. For delay sensitive applications, the proposed scheme shows a superior performance in terms of packet error rate compared with the conventional HARQ and Fixed retransmission schemes when the channel state information is not available at the transmitter. We further show... 

Nickel oxide (NiOx) is a promising hole transport material in inverted organic-inorganic metal halide perovskite solar cells. However, its low intrinsic conductivity hinders its further improvement in device performance. Here, we employ a trimercapto-s-triazine trisodium salt (TTTS) as a chelating agent of Ni2+ in the NiOx layer to improve its conductivity. Due to the electron-deficient triazine ring, the TTTS complexes with Ni2+ in NiOx via a strong Ni2+-N coordination bond and increases the ratio of Ni3+:Ni2+. The increased Ni3+ concentration adjusts the band structure of NiOx, thus enhancing hole density and mobility, eventually improving the intrinsic conductivity of NiOx. As a result,... 

TiO2 is a promising photoanode material for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting, but its severe bulk recombination of photogenerated carriers, sluggish oxygen evolution reaction (OER) kinetics and poor visible light response are the main bottleneck problems. Here, the carbon quantum dots (CQDs) modified anatase/rutile TiO2 photoanode (CQDs/A/R-TiO2) was designed by growth of anatase TiO2 nanothorns on rutile TiO2 nanorods and further surface modification of CQDs. The results revealed that the A/R-TiO2 heterojunction significantly suppressed the bulk recombination of photogenerated carriers. With further incorporation of CQDs into A/R-TiO2, dramatical improvement of OER kinetics and... 

Deployment of low-power low-cost small access points such as femtocell access points (FAPs) constitute an attractive solution for improving the existing macrocell access points' (MAPs) capacity, reliability, and coverage. However, FAP deployment faces challenging problems such as interference management and the lack of flexible frameworks for deploying the FAPs by the service providers (SPs). In this paper, we propose a novel solution that jointly associates the user equipment (UE) to the APs, and allocates the FAPs to the SPs such that the the total satisfaction of the UEs in an uplink OFDMA network is maximized. We model the competitive behaviors among the UEs, FAPs, and SPs as a dynamic... 

H2S and CO2 are the main impurities in raw natural gas, which needs to be purified before use. However, the comprehensive utilization of H2S and CO2 has been ignored. Herein, we proposed a fully resource-based method to convert toxic gas H2S and greenhouse gas CO2 synchronously into CO and elemental S by using a novel electrochemical reactor. The special designs include that, in the anodic chamber, H2S was oxidized rapidly to S based on the I−/I3− cyclic redox system to avoid anode passivation. On the other hand, in the cathodic chamber, CO2 was rapidly and selectively reduced to CO based on a porous carbon gas diffusion electrode (GDE) modified with polytetrafluoroethylene and cobalt... 

Aluminum alloys and high density polyethylene are utilized in a wide variety of industrial applications. In the present work the feasibility of friction stir butt welding between AA5059 alloy and high density polyethylene sheets is examined. The bonding mechanism, joint strength, and microhardness are considered in this study. Various welding parameters and tool alignment were investigated until sound joints were achieved by positioning approximately 85% of the rotating tool in the aluminum material on the advancing side (1.4 mm offset) at constant spindle speed and traverse speed of 710 rpm and 63 mm/min, respectively. The results indicate that AA5059 aluminum and high density polyethylene... 

As an important precursor of crystalline phases, amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC), especially ultrasmall ACC clusters, have been attracting great interest in fundamental research, materials chemistry, as well as industrial applications. However, it is still challenging to synthesize stable ACC clusters in water that can be isolated and concentrated without severe aggregation. Herein, we report a facile dialysis method for producing colloidally stable ACC clusters that are well dispersed in water with the protection of specific polycarboxylic acids, which could be also easily deprotected by small-molecule acids like sodium citrate. Inherent proto-calcite short-range order is found to be... 

Hydroxyapatite (HA) coatings were deposited on commercially pure titanium plates using a hydrothermal-electrochemical deposition method in an electrolyte containing calcium and phosphate ions. The deposition conditions used in this study were the followings: electrolyte temperature (33-80 °C), current density (1-8 mA/cm2), and deposition time (10-120 min). Needle-like and granular crystals of apatite coating were created with different concentrations of calcium (0.0021-0.042 M) and phosphate (0.00125-0.025 M) salts. The size of HA crystals of the coating was considerably changed with different concentration of calcium and phosphate salts, temperature of the electrolyte, and deposition time.... 

Electrochemical co-deposition approach was expanded to prepare composite bio-ceramic coating of hydroxyapatite (HA)/polyvinyl acetate on the surface of titanium. The role is to improve the bioactive and crystallization properties. The results of XRD, XPS, SEM and TEM characterization showed that by increasing amount of vinyl acetate in the composite bio-ceramic coating before and after immersing in the simulated body fluid (SBF), an oriented growth of HA planes on the (0 0 2) direction had been observed on titanium substrate. Also significant surface morphology changes were obtained  

Because of the compatibility with tandem devices and the ability to be manufactured at low temperatures, inverted perovskite solar cells have generated far-ranging interest for potential commercial applications. However, their efficiency remains inadequate owing to various traps in the perovskite film and the restricted hole blocking ability of the electron transport layer. Thus, in this work, a wide-bandgap n-type semiconductor, 4,6-bis(3,5-di(pyridin-4-yl)phenyl)-2-phenylpyrimidine (B4PyPPM), to modify a perovskite film via an anti-solvent method is introduced. The nitrogen sites of pyrimidine and pyridine rings in B4PyPPM exhibit strong interactions with the undercoordinated lead ions in... 

The paper at hand intends to evaluate thermoelastic damping (TED) in circular plates by incorporating nonlocal effect within the constitutive and heat conduction frameworks. To attain this purpose, nonclassical coupled thermoelastic equations are established on the basis of nonlocal elasticity theory and Guyer–Krumhansl (GK) heat conduction model. By considering symmetric time–harmonic vibrations, the size-dependent thermoelastic frequency equation is derived. By solving this nonclassical eigenvalue problem, real and imaginary parts of damped natural frequency are separated. According to the definition of TED in the framework of complex frequency approach, a closed-form expression... 

Sulfur-containing gaseous contaminant treatment is a key issue in the healthy and sustainable development of industry, especially SO2 and H2S occur with natural gas extraction and fossil fuel burning. Traditionally, the commercial method for H2S or SO2 requires numerous desiccants and enormous energy consumption. Encouragingly, electrochemical coupling system, which provide an efficient, sustainable, and economic pathway for sulfur-containing gaseous contaminants removal, can convert H2S and SO2 to recyclable substance in a moderate environment and simultaneously transfer the energy contained in them to other more valuable product. The current review discusses the mechanism and principle of... 

We present a physics-enhanced implicit neural representation (INR) for ultrasound (US) imaging that learns tissue properties from overlapping US sweeps. Our proposed method leverages a ray-tracing-based neural rendering for novel view US synthesis. Recent publications demonstrated that INR models could encode a representation of a three-dimensional scene from a set of two-dimensional US frames. However, these models fail to consider the view-dependent changes in appearance and geometry intrinsic to US imaging. In our work, we discuss direction-dependent changes in the scene and show that a physics-inspired rendering improves the fidelity of US image synthesis. In particular, we demonstrate... 

Warm-up period is considered as the most critical phase in the operation of any device that converts the energy of a fuel into heat, electricity, and other products, including power generation units since the system efficiency and environmental pollution levels are much worse than the normal operation in that phase. Considering this point, in this study, applying the zero-flow coolant strategy to reduce the warm-up period is suggested for power generation units and it is investigated in details. An internal combustion engine is selected as the case-study and implementation of the method to enhance the performance of that from both energy and environmental aspects are studied comprehensively.... 

There are very limited researches carried out to investigate the influence of saturation degrees, freezing-thawing, and curing times on geotechnical properties of lime concrete (LC) and lime-cement concrete (LCC) due to the capillary action and changes in groundwater table. Subsequently, the primary goal of this research is to investigate the influence of these parameters on mechanical properties of LC and LCC using unconfined compression tests, namely uniaxial compressive strength (UCS), stress-strain behavior, deformability index (I D ), secant modulus (E S ), failure strain, bulk modulus (K), resilient modulus (M R ), brittleness index (I B ), and shear modulus (G). At first, the... 

Accurate monthly electricity consumption forecasting (ECF) can help retailers enhance the profitability in deregulated electricity markets. Most current methods use monthly load data to perform monthly ECF, which usually produces large errors due to insufficient training samples. A few methods try to use fine-grained smart-meter data (e.g., hourly data) to increase training samples. However, such methods still exhibit low accuracy due to the increase in forecasting steps. © 1975-2012 IEEE  

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.... 

Urea is a major source of nitrogen pollution in domestic sewage and its denitrification is difficult since it is very likely to be converted into ammonia or nitrate instead of expected N2. Herein, we propose an exhaustive denitrification method for urea via the oxidation of amine/ammonia-N with chlorine oxide radical, which induced from a bi-functional RuO2//WO3 anode, and the highly selective reduction of nitrate-N on cathode in photoelectrochemical cell (PEC). Under illumination, the WO3 photoanode side promotes the quantities hydroxyl and reactive chlorine radical, and these radicals are immediately combined to stronger chlorine oxide radical by RuO2 side, which obviously enhances the... 

A new resonance phenomenon is discussed and demonstrated by experiment in a dual-polarization cavity. The resonance is formed by waves bouncing between two anisotropic metasurfaces placed at the cavity ends. The simple metasurfaces are designed to preserve the handedness of circularly polarized waves upon reflection. The standing waves resulting from such reflections do not have nodes and antinodes. A theoretical solution to the resonance condition is discussed, both for plane-waves and equivalent guided waves. The concept is then experimentally applied to dual-mode guided waves, demonstrating a very short cavity at X-band. This brings new possibilities for resonator design and can...