Sharif Digital Repository

This paper presents a three-dimensional phenomenological constitutive model for magnetic shape memory alloys (MSMAs), developed within the framework of irreversible continuum thermodynamics. To this end, a proper set of internal variables is introduced to reflect the microstructural consequences on the material macroscopic behavior. Moreover, a stress-dependent thermodynamic force threshold for variant reorientation is introduced which improves the model accuracy. Preassumed kinetic equations for magnetic domain volume fractions, decoupled equations for magnetization unit vectors and appropriate presentation of the limit function for martensite variant reorientation lead to a simple... 

In this research, low density polyethylene (LDPE) and poly ethylene-co-vinyl acetate (EVA) were used as polymeric materials. The methods used to produce LDPE and EVA was Film Blowing and ThermalDry Phase Inversion. The amount of permeability, diffusivity and solubility of O2 and CO2 through above polymers were obtained and also the effect of temperature, pressure and film thickness for LDPE was measured. The Barometric method was considered and measurements were based on ASTM standard. To study film cross-section morphology in EVA, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) was applied. From results we considered that the amount of permeability and solubility were decreased by increasing film... 

An optical amplifier followed by a bistable element has been statistically analyzed before [1]. In this manuscript, output noise analysis represents, then signal to noise ratios (SNR) are calculated either for input or output. It will be shown that noise reduction, can be achieved by a proper selection of parameters  

In this research, low density polyethylene (LDPE) and poly(ethylene-co-vinyl acetate) (EVA) were used as polymeric materials. The methods used to produce LDPE and EVA was film blowing and thermal-dry phase inversion. The amount of permeability, diffusivity and solubility of O2 and CO2 through above polymers were obtained and also the effect of temperature, pressure and film thickness for LDPE was measured. To study film cross-section morphology in EVA, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was applied. The results showed that the amount of permeability and solubility were decreased by increasing film thickness but diffusivity was increased. However, by increasing temperature, permeability,... 

In this study, a novel biodegradable hyaluronic acid (HA) based microgel were prepared via enzymatic crosslinking of tyramine conjugated HA (HA-TA) in an inverse microemulsion. HA-TA microdroplets were crosslinked within a few seconds in the presence of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) and hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ). The high water content of the polymeric network and the inherent negative charge of the HA-TA microgels provided a suitable platform for encapsulation of cationic proteins like lysozyme and TGF-β1 growth factor. The results demonstrated that lysozyme was released, after an initial burst release, in a suitable sustained manner over a period of four weeks. Both diffusion and... 

Developing scaffolds that can provide cells and biological cues simultaneously in the defect site is of interest in tissue engineering field. In this study, platelet lysate (PL) as an autologous and inexpensive source of growth factors was incorporated into a cell-laden injectable hyaluronic acid-tyramine (HA-TA) hydrogel. Subsequently, the effect of platelet lysate on cell attachment, viability and differentiation of human mesenchymal stem cell (hMSCs) toward chondrocytes was investigated. HA-TA conjugates having a degree of substitution of 20 TA moieties per 100 disaccharide units were prepared and crosslinked in the presence of horseradish peroxidase and low concentrations of hydrogen... 

Platelet lysate (PL), a blood product that contains high concentrations of growth factors (GFs), can be considered as a cost-effective source of multiple GFs. In this study, hyaluronic acid (HA) based microgels were developed for delivery of PL proteins. Spherical microgel were prepared using a water in oil emulsion method. First, hyaluronic acid was grafted with tyramine groups, after which prepared microdroplets were crosslinked via an enzymatic reaction in the presence of hydrogen peroxide and horseradish peroxidase. Because of electrostatic interactions, these microgels are promising carriers for positively charged proteins entrapment like most of the GFs. When microgels are incubated in... 

A label-free electrochemical biosensor was developed for the rapid detection of the matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9) biomarker on the basis of antibody immobilizing on the zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticle and ZnO nanorod electrodes. The charge transfer resistance (Rct) of the electrodes was used as the indicator for MMP-9 concentration, which was obtained through cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The ZnO nanorod-based biosensor exhibited linear behavior in the MMP-9 concentration range of 1–1000 ng/ml, which is a wider range than the available concentration ranges for most of the conventional methods. The biosensor sensitivity was 32.5 μA/(decade × cm2)... 

This study presents a seasonal multi-product multi-period inventory control model with inventory costs obtained under inflation and all-unit discount policy. The products are delivered in boxes of known quantities and both backorder and lost-sale quantities are considered in case of shortage. The goal is to find a representative set of Pareto optimal solutions (including the ordering quantities) in different periods and to minimize both the total inventory cost (i.e. ordering, holding, shortage, and purchasing costs) and the total storage space, simultaneously. Three multi-objective optimization algorithms of non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), non-dominated ranked genetic... 

We propose a solvable generalization of the Tonks-Girardeau model that describes a coherent one-dimensional (1D) gas of cold two-level bosons which interact with two external fields in a Ramsey interferometer. They also interact among themselves by idealized, infinitely strong contact potentials, with interchange of momentum and internal state. We study the corresponding Ramsey fringes and the quantum projection noise which, essentially unaffected by the interactions, remains that for ideal bosons. The dual system of this gas, an ideal gas of two-level fermions coupled by the interaction with the separated fields, produces the same fringes and noise fluctuations. The cases of time-separated... 

The purpose of this research is to explain the surface modification of fabricated polyamide reverse osmosis (RO) membranes using UV-initiated graft polymerization at different irradiation times (15, 30, 60, and 90 s) and various acrylamide concentrations (10, 20, and 30 g L−1). Also, coating of membranes surface with various concentrations of TiO2 nanoparticles (10, 20, 30, and 50 ppm) followed by the same UV irradiation times was investigated. After that, the membranes modification was done by grafting of acrylamide blended with TiO2 nanoparticles via UV irradiation. The characterization of membranes surface properties and their performance were systematically carried out. The results... 

The use of a draft tube fluidized bed bioreactor (DTFBB) has been successfully demonstrated for the bioleaching of a chalcopyrite concentrate (Mousavi, et. al., 2005). In the present paper this technique was used for the bioleaching of zinc from a sphalerite bearing low-grade ore. A strain of the thermophilic bacterium, Sulfobacillus, has been isolated from the Kooshk lead and zinc mine near the city of Yazd (Iran) and is tested at temperatures 47 °C-72 °C. This is compared to leaching with a strain of the mesophile Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans, which has been adapted to the high levels of zinc and the presence of the low-grade ore, and which was tested at temperatures 18 °C-42 °C. The... 

First we discuss briefly the importance of time and time keeping, explaining the basic functioning of clocks in general and of atomic clocks based on Ramsey interferometry in particular. The usefulness of cold atoms is discussed, as well as their limits if Bose-Einstein condensates are used. We study as an alternative a different cold-atom regime: the Tonks-Girardeau (TG) gas of tightly confined and strongly interacting bosons. The TG gas is reviewed and then generalized for two-level atoms. Finally, we explore the combination of Ramsey interferometry and TG gases. © 2008 IOP Publishing Ltd  

The effects of external resistance on the recruitment of trunk muscles and the role of intrinsic and reflexive mechanisms to ensure the spinal stability are significant issues in spinal biomechanics. A computational model of spine under the control of 48 anatomically oriented muscle actions was used to simulate iso-resistive trunk movements. Neural excitation of muscles was attained based on inverse dynamics approach along with the stability-based optimization. The effect of muscle spindle reflex response on the trunk movement stability was evaluated upon the application of a perturbation moment. In this study, the trunk extension movement at various resistance levels while extending from... 

Control Performance Assessment (CPA) and tuning of PID controllers are studied in this paper. We propose a framework for systematic analysis of the tradeoff between the structural complexity of the controller and its performance. As the measure of the controller performance, an LQG based index is used. The problem is augmented with an additional term which forces sparsity on the complexity of a decentralized PID controller. The desired complexity is controlled via a weighting parameter which determines the cost of each additional element (i.e., P, I, and D terms). The result is a decentralized multivariable PID controller in which the complexity of each loop controller is optimized such that... 

Control Performance Assessment (CPA) and tuning of PID controllers are studied in this paper. We propose a framework for systematic analysis of the tradeoff between the structural complexity of the controller and its performance. As the measure of the controller performance, an LQG based index is used. The problem is augmented with an additional term which forces sparsity on the complexity of a decentralized PID controller. The desired complexity is controlled via a weighting parameter which determines the cost of each additional element (i.e., P, I, and D terms). The result is a decentralized multivariable PID controller in which the complexity of each loop controller is optimized such that... 

One of the distributed solutions for scaling Web Search Engines (WSEs) may be peer-to-peer (P2P) structures. P2P structures are successfully being used in many systems with lower cost than ordinary distributed solutions. However, the fact that they can also be beneficial for large-scale WSEs is still a controversial subject. In this paper, we introduce challenges in using P2P structures to design a large-scale WSE. Considering different types of P2P systems, we introduce possible P2P models for this purpose. Using some quantitative evaluation, we compare these models from different aspects to find out which one is the best in order to construct a large-scale WSE. Our studies indicate that... 

Crack detection is a vital component of structural health monitoring. Several computer vision-based studies have been proposed to conduct crack detection on concrete surfaces, but most cases have difficulties in detecting fine cracks. This study proposes a deep learning-based model for automatic crack detection on the concrete surface. Our proposed model is an encoder–decoder model which uses EfficientNet-B7 as the encoder and U-Net’s modified expansion path as the decoder. To overcome the challenges in the detection of fine cracks, we trained our model with a new training strategy on images extracted from an open-access dataset and achieved a 96.98% F1 score for unseen test data. Moreover,... 

Crack detection is a vital component of structural health monitoring. Several computer vision-based studies have been proposed to conduct crack detection on concrete surfaces, but most cases have difficulties in detecting fine cracks. This study proposes a deep learning-based model for automatic crack detection on the concrete surface. Our proposed model is an encoder–decoder model which uses EfficientNet-B7 as the encoder and U-Net’s modified expansion path as the decoder. To overcome the challenges in the detection of fine cracks, we trained our model with a new training strategy on images extracted from an open-access dataset and achieved a 96.98% F1 score for unseen test data. Moreover,...