Production of Nanosized TiO2 Powder from Kahnouj Ilmenite Concentrate

, Ph.D. Dissertation Sharif University of Technology Mozammel, Mahdi (Author) ; Sadrnezhaad, Khatiboleslam (Supervisor)

Abstract

This research tries to simulate the conditions of nanosized TiO2 powder production from pure commercial precursors, to produce nanosized TiO2 powder by leaching kahnouj ilmenite concentrate. For this purpose, the ilmenite concentrate was first oxidized to study the kinetics and optimization of oxidation process before leaching. Then the effect of pre-oxidation on the iron and titanium leaching efficiency was studied. Then the reductive leaching of concentrate using zinc and iron powders as reducing agent for Fe (III) to Fe (II) reaction was studied. The effect of reducing agent as well as oxidation and reduction on the leaching efficiency was studied. At the next step the optimum conditions...

Kinetics of silver dissolution in nitric acid from Ag-Au0.04-Cu0.10 and Ag-Cu0.23 scraps

, Article Journal of Materials Science and Technology ; Volume 22, Issue 5 , 2006 , Pages 696-700 ; 10050302 (ISSN) Sadrnezhaad, S. K ; Ahmadi, E ; Mozammel, M ; Sharif University of Technology

2006

Abstract

Kinetics of dissolution of silver present in precious metal scraps in HNO3 was studied in temperature range of 26-85°C. Dissolution rate of silver was much faster than that of copper at all temperatures. Effects of particle size, stirring speed, acid concentration and temperature on the rate of dissolving of silver were evaluated. Dissolution rate decreases with particle size and increases with temperature. Dissolving was accelerated with acid concentrations less than 10 mol/L, Concentrations greater than 10 mol/L resulted in slowing down of the dissolution rate. Shrinking core model with internal diffusion equation t/τ = 1 - 3 (1-x)2/3 + 2 (1-x) could be used to explain the mechanism of the...

Kinetics of pressure oxidative leaching of molybdenite concentrate by nitric acid

, Article Hydrometallurgy ; Volume 111-112, Issue 1 , January , 2012 , Pages 52-57 ; 0304386X (ISSN) Khoshnevisan, A ; Yoozbashizadeh, H ; Mozammel, M ; Sadrnezhaad, S. K ; Sharif University of Technology

2012

Abstract

The current study was carried out to investigate the kinetics of reactions for the pressure oxidative leaching of a molybdenite concentrate in less than one hour. The effects of oxygen pressure, stirring speed, pulp density, acid concentration and temperature on the leaching rate of the molybdenum were studied. It was found that about 85% of molybdenite was oxidized to molybdic oxide precipitate with remaining molybdenum dissolved in the leaching liquor. Analysis of experimental data showed that the reaction is chemically controlled with activation energy of 68.8 kJ/mol. Furthermore SEM images showed no significant boundary diffusion layer and it was noted that the molybdic oxide...

Kinetics and reaction mechanism of isothermal oxidation of Iranian ilmenite concentrate powder

, Article Journal of Thermal Analysis and Calorimetry ; Volume 112, Issue 2 , 2013 , Pages 781-789 ; 13886150 (ISSN) Mozammel, M ; Sadrnezhaad, S. K ; Khoshnevisan, A ; Youzbashizadeh, H ; Sharif University of Technology

2013

Abstract

Thermal oxidation of commercial ilmenite concentrate from Kahnouj titanium mines, Iran, at 500-950 C was investigated for the first time. Fractional conversion was calculated from mass change of the samples during oxidation. Maximum FeO to Fe2O3 conversion of 98.63 % occurred at 900 C after 120 min. Curve fit trials together with SEM line scan results indicated constant-size shrinking core model as the closest kinetic mechanism of the oxidation process. Below 750 C, chemical reaction with activation energy of 80.65 kJ mol-1 and between 775 and 950 C, ash diffusion with activation energy of 53.50 kJ mol-1 were the prevailing mechanisms. X-ray diffraction patterns approved presence of...

Breakthrough curves for adsorption and elution of rhenium in a column ion exchange system

, Article Hydrometallurgy ; Volume 85, Issue 1 , 2007 , Pages 17-23 ; 0304386X (ISSN) Mozammel, M ; Sadrnezhaad, S. K ; Badami, E ; Ahmadi, E ; Sharif University of Technology

2007

Abstract

Impure rhenium and molybdenum bearing solution was passed through a column of Varian strong base anionic resin for selective adsorption of rhenium and molybdenum ions from the solution. Elution of molybdenum and rhenium was carried out using 2 N NaOH and 0.2 N NH4SCN, respectively. The effect of resin bed height on breakthrough time was investigated. Experimental and theoretical curves were compared with good agreement. The results showed that the behavior pattern of these curves was repeatable and almost constant. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

MBBR and MBR Reactor Configuration for Better Performance

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology (Author) ; Borgheei, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

Membrane bioreactors (MBRs) which are commonly understood as the combination of membrane filtration and biological treatment using activated sludge have several advantages, but membrane fouling reduces the membrane efficiency, permeability and lifetime. An alternative is replacing a moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) with the activated sludge system which may reduce the effect of membrane fouling. The sludge produced in MBBRs has poor settling characteristics, therefore, their efficiency is limited by the sedimentation tank performance and they require a larger settling surface. The combination of moving bed biofilm reactors and membrane bioreactors can compensate for the drawbacks of both of...

Forecasting the effects of a Canada-US currency union on output and prices: A counterfactual analysis

, Article Journal of Forecasting ; Volume 32, Issue 7 , 2013 , Pages 639-653 ; 02776693 (ISSN) Mahdi Barakchian, S ; Sharif University of Technology

2013

Abstract

This paper is a counterfactual analysis investigating the consequences of the formation of a currency union for Canada and the USA: whether outputs increase and prices decrease if these countries form a currency union. We use a two-country cointegrated model to conduct the counterfactual analysis, where the conditional forecasts are generated based on the Gaussian assumption. To deal with structural breaks and model uncertainty, conditional forecasts are generated from different models/estimation windows and the model-averaging technique is used to combine the forecasts. We also examine the robustness of our results to parameter uncertainty using the wild bootstrap method. The results show...

Evaluation of Non-linear Combination Method (Neural Network) For Value-at-Risk Forecasting in Market

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Rashnavadi, Leila (Author) ; Barakchian, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

Value at risk of an asset, is the asset’s expected maximum loss for a certain period of time and at a specified confidence level. Value-at-Risk can be calculated in the bank with its inter-nal method or standardized method. when a method have more violation number then bank need to keep more daily capital requirements. under the Basel 2 agreement if the violation of method more than 10 times in year, the Bank uses the standardized method.
There are trade off Between daily capital charge and violations. Therefore, existing methods for calculating the value at risk, usually lead to much daily capital charge or many violations. Studies show with combination of different methods to calculate...

Using Complex Network Metrics for Evaluating the Influence of Conference and Journal Papers in Computer Science

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Habibi, Fatemeh (Author) ; Jalili, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

Journals and conferences in computer science are the major venue for publishing new achievement in the field. It is an expert opinion that a number of top conferences in computer science are even more important than journals. In this work we aim at studying this in terms of citation analysis. To this end, we took 100 top journals and 63 top conferences and extracted their citation graph through Scopus dataset. We then constructed the citation graph in which the nodes were the journals and conferences and the links corresponded to the citations of the papers. We used various measures to rank the nodes in the graph. The ranking methods included Prestige, PageRank, Eigenfactor, HITS and SALSA....

Design and Implementation of a VLSI Architecture for Time and Frequency Synchronization in the LTE

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Golnari, Amene (Author) ; Shabany, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

The long term evolution (LTE) standard is introduced and developed by the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). OFDM systems, in spite of having many advantages such high performance in bandwidth usage, are very sensitive to inter carrier interference (ICI) as a drawback. In order to prevent ICI, the frequency offset, mainly caused by the miss-match between oscillators' frequency and also between the sampling frequency of the transmitter and the receiver, should be estimated and compensated. Frequency synchronization is a part of the tasks of a synchronizer. In this thesis, main tasks of a synchronizer are illustrated and...

A New Approach in Value-at-Risk (VaR) Estimation by Forecast Combination Methods

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Seraj, Mostafa (Author) ; Barakchian, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

Value-at-Risk (VaR) is the most commontool for risk management. This tool is used to measure market risk and also used as a basis in determining financial standards for international financial institutions. VaR is the maximum loss of the asset portfolio at the specified confidence level and certain time horizon. Many parametric, nonparametric and semi parametric methods have been invented for VaR estimation. Each one of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages and different methods may perform better in differnet situations.When estimating VaR, we can choose one of these methods or we can combine the VaRs estimated by different methods. There are few researches conducted on VaR...

EEG Brain Functional Network Analysis in Cortex Level

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Pedrood, Bahman (Author) ; Jalili, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

Complex networks science have received tremendous attention in recent years and the brain is one of the systems to which graph theoretical tools have been applied. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease affecting many of elderly population. AD changes the anatomy of the brain, which subsequently results in changes in its functions. These changes have been frequently reported in signals recorded from the brain (such as MEG, fMRI and EEG). Among these neuroimaging techniques EEG is one of the most aproprate methods for extracting functional connectivites according to high temporal resolution. In this thesis, we aimed at analyzing the properties of EEG-based functional networks...

Learning Improvement in Phase Oscillator Models

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Aghighi, Meysam (Author) ; Jalili, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

In the recent years, the problem of modeling a cognitive task using phase oscillators has been receiving a significant attention. In this view, single neurons are no longer elementary computational units. Rather, coherent oscillating groups of neurons are seen as nodes of networks performing cognitive tasks. From this assumption, we develop a model of stimulus-response learning and recognition. The most significant part of our work is defining learning methods for natural frequencies and coupling weights in a coupled phase oscillator network under Kuramoto conditions. In this thesis, we improved the previous models by not only emphasizing on the frequency of the oscillators but also taking...

Evaluation of Caviar Models Incorporated with Intraday Information ,the Case Study:Estimation Value at Risk of Gold

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Karimi, Parvane (Author) ; Barakchian, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

Value at risk (VaR) is the maximum loss of the asset portfolio at the specified confidence level and certain time horizon. This tool is used to measure market risk and also used as a basis in determining financial standards for international financial instituation. Conditional Autoregressive Value at Risk models or CAViaR models introduced by Engle and Manganelli (2004). This models calculate VaR base on quantile regession approach and show some promising performance properties.
In order to propose a more accurate model for calcutating VaR , we develop CAViaR models by incorporating them with intraday information then we calculate VaR with this kind of models and CAViaR...

Design and Implementation of a Spectrum Sensor for Cognitive Radio

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Safavi, Mahya (Author) ; Shabani, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

Frequency scarcity has emerged the necessity of opportunistic utilization of frequency bands, which can be realized through a cognitive radio system. During an agile communication between unlicensed users, a cognitive radio system must avoid collision with licensed users. Hence it should continuously observe the band of interest and report the presence of licensed user signals. This task is fulfilled by a vital part of a cognitive radio system, called the spectrum sensing core. Recently several techniques have been proposed for the spectrum sensing in literature. Some of them like matched filtering, cyclostationarity based detection are based on primary user signal features. However energy...

VLSI Architecture of Turbo Decoder for LTE

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Ardakani, Arash (Author) ; Shabany, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

Long Term Evolution (LTE) aims the peak data rates in excess of 300 Mb/s, which may appear to be challenging to achieve due to the existence of some blocks such as the turbo decoder. One efficient approach to achieve this throughput is by parallelizing the Log Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) algorithm in the turbo decoder. In fact, the interleaver is known to be a major challenging part of the turbo decoder due to its need to the parallel interleaved memory access. LTE uses Quadratic Permutation Polynomial (QPP) interleaver, which makes it suitable for the parallel decoding. In this thesis, first, we propose an efficient architecture for the QPP interleaver, called the Add-Compare-Select (ACS)...

Efficient Hardware Implementation of ECG Derived Respiration (EDR) System, Applied to Body Area Network (BAN)

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Shayei, Ali (Author) ; Shabany, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

The rapid growth in the health care technology, has made the Body Area Network (BAN) as an attracting topic for research and design development. BAN devices have restrictions on their size and power consumption. Monitoring the respiratory signal is crucial in many medical applications and is normally part of a BAN system. Traditional methods for the respiration measurement are normally based on measuring the volume of air inhaled and exhaled by lungs (like a spirometer) or oxygen saturation in blood. However, these methods have numerous drawbacks including their high cost and limited accessibility. In this thesis, a novel scheme is proposed to derive the respiratory signal from the...

Dynamic Security Assessment in Restructured Power Systems

, Ph.D. Dissertation Sharif University of Technology Kheradmandi, Morteza (Author) ; Ehsan, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

This thesis addresses the problem of dynamic security assessment in power sys-tems with an emphasis on its application in restructured power systems and issues arising in its applications. The new electric utility environment has an immedi-ate consequence of emphasis on reliability and secure operation of power systems. This requires faster and more precise methods to assess the dynamic aspect of se-curity. On the other hand, this issue is becoming challenging when the determined dispatch might not be accommodated due to violation of the limits.This thesis addresses the problem of dynamic security assessment in power sys-tems with an emphasis on its application in restructured power systems...

Incommensurability Problems: Feyerabend’s Linguistic Solution

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Shafah, Alireza (Author) ; Nasrin, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Constructing EEG-Based Brain Functional Connectome Using Network-based Statistics

, M.Sc. Thesis Sharif University of Technology Barzegaran, Elham (Author) ; Jalili, Mahdi (Supervisor)

Abstract

In recent years, there have been increasing attempts to study brain connectivity. Among a number of brain mapping techniques, Electroencephalography is an easy to use and cheap method that can be used in the study of brain function. One way of understanding the intricate wiring pattern and functions of brain is to consider it as a complex network. In this approach, a graph of brain functions, based on the functional relation of recorded electric signals, is constructed and then the network is evaluated with a number of network metrics that measure its different aspect of structure. Different neurological and psychological diseases can affect the connectivity power within the brain; as a...