Sharif Digital Repository

While energy consumption is increasing worldwide due to population growth, the fossil fuels are unstable and exhaustible resources for establishing sustainable life. Using biodegradable compounds present in the wastewater produced in industrial process as a renewable source is an enchanting approach followed by scientists for maintaining a sustainable energy production to vanquish this problem for ulterior generations. In this research, bioelectricity generation with whey degradation was investigated in a two-chamber microbial fuel cell with humic acid as anodic electron mediator and a cathode compartment including combinational electron acceptor. Escherichia coli was able to use the... 

This work is concerned with the experimental investigation of mass transfer, which occurs during diffusion of hydrocarbon solvents in heavy oil based on constant and concentration-dependent diffusion coefficient. Here, a series of free fall diffusion experiments have been conducted in sealed test tubes at fixed temperatures. Pentane, hexane, and octane were used as solvents and were placed on heavy oil in tubes. The diffusivity of heavy oil into solvents was monitored by a digital camera. The image analysis technique was applied to extract concentration profiles in diffusion zones of solvents by means of calibration curves. Fick's second law was used to obtain both constant and... 

In vivo dose-dependent effects of nanoscale graphene oxide (NGO) sheets on reproduction capability of Balb/C mice were investigated. Biodistribution study of the NGO sheets (intravenously injected into male mice at dose of ∼2000 μg/mL or 4 mg/kg of body weight) showed a high graphene uptake in testis. Hence, in vivo effects of the NGO sheets on important characteristics of spermatozoa (including their viability, morphology, kinetics, DNA damage and chromosomal aberration) were evaluated. Significant in vivo effects was found at the injected concentrations ≥200 μg/mL after (e.g., ∼45% reduction in sperm viability and motility at 2000 μg/mL). Observation of remarkable DNA fragmentations and... 

Asian red ginseng was used for green reduction of chemically exfoliated graphene oxide (GO) into reduced graphene oxide (rGO). The reduction level and electrical conductivity of the ginseng-rGO sheets were comparable to those of hydrazine-rGO ones. Reduction by ginseng resulted in repairing the sp 2 graphitic structure of the rGO, while hydrazine-rGO showed more defects and/or smaller aromatic domains. The ginseng-rGO sheets presented a better stability against aggregation than the hydrazine-rGO ones in an aqueous suspension. Whilst the hydrophobic hydrazine-rGO films exhibited no toxicity against human neural stem cells (hNSCs), the hydrophilic GO and ginseng-rGO films (as more... 

Vigorous debates have taken place within and between many countries about regulatory policy regimes covering the assessment and approval of genetically modified (GM) crops. In Iran, a very vigorous and hotly contested policy debate concerning legislation covering GM crops occurred between 2004 and 2009, but it was confined within government circles with almost no public discussion. This paper analyses the Iranian policy-making process in the period 2006-9. It explains how and why a stalemate arose in disputes between ministries and departments. The chosen analytical framework draws mainly on the regulation of technological risks and the analysis of public policy-making. It deploys the... 

A μ-way latin trade of volume s is a set of μ partial latin rectangles (of inconsequential size) containing exactly the same s filled cells, such that if cell (i, j) is filled, it contains a different entry in each of the μ partial latin rectangles, and such that row i in each of the μ partial latin rectangles contains, set-wise, the same symbols and column j, likewise. In this paper we show that all μ-way latin trades with sufficiently large volumes exist, and state some theorems on the non-existence of μ-way latin trades of certain volumes. We also find the set of possible volumes (that is, the volume spectrum) of μ-way latin trades for μ = 4 and 5. (The case μ = 2 was dealt with by Fu,... 

The set of integers k for which there exist three latin squares of order n having precisely k cells identical, with their remaining n2 -k cells different in all three latin squares, denoted by I3[n], is determined here for all orders n. In particular, it is shown that I3[n] = {0,.,n2 -15}U [n2 - 12,n2-9,n2], for n ≫8. ©2002 Eisevier Science B.V. All rights reserved  

Coronary angiography is a vital instrument to detect the prevailing of vascular diseases, and accurate vascular segmentation acts a crucial role for proper quantitative analysis of the vascular tree morphological features. Level set methods are popular for segmenting the coronary arteries, but their performance is related to suitable start-up and optimum setting of regulating parameters, essentially done manually. This research presents a novel fuzzy level set procedure with the objective of segmentation of the coronary artery tree in 2-D X-ray angiography as automatically. It is clever to clearly develop from the early segmentation with spatial fuzzy grouping. The adjusting parameters of... 

Visual attributes are great means of describing images or scenes, in a way both humans and computers understand. In order to establish a correspondence between images and to be able to compare the strength of each property between images, relative attributes were introduced. However, since their introduction, hand-crafted and engineered features were used to learn increasingly complex models for the problem of relative attributes. This limits the applicability of those methods for more realistic cases. We introduce a deep neural network architecture for the task of relative attribute prediction. A convolutional neural network (ConvNet) is adopted to learn the features by including an... 

We present the first public code for the calculation of the astrometric centroid shift occurring during microlensing events. The computation is based on the contour integration scheme and covers single and binary lensing of finite sources with arbitrary limb darkening profiles. This allows for general detailed investigations of the impact of finite source size in astrometric binary microlensing. The new code is embedded in version 3.0 of vbbinarylensing, which offers a powerful computational tool for extensive studies of microlensing data from current surveys and future space missions. © 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society  

The possibility of real-time tuning of optical devices has attracted a lot of interest over the last decade. At the same time, coming up with simple lithography-free structures has always been a challenge in the design of large-area compatible devices. In this work, we present the concept and the sample design of an electrically tunable, lithography-free, ultra-thin transmission-mode color filter, the spectrum of which continuously covers the whole visible region. A simple Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) cavity configuration is used. It is shown that using the electro-optic dielectric material of 4-dimethyl-amino-N-methyl-4-stilbazoliumtosylate (DAST) as the dielectric layer in this... 

Magnetic flux leakage is the most widely used method for oil and gas pipeline non destructive testing. The saturation level of the sample under test has a significant effect on its efficiency; therefore, the magnetizing yoke requires an elaborate design. The finite element method is the conventional approach used for this purpose, but it is very time consuming. In this article, a neuro-fuzzy method is presented to model the behavior of the magnetizing yoke. Modeling a few different designs with the finite element method and using the results for training the neuro-fuzzy model eradicates the necessity of modeling a huge number of designs with the finite element method. The acquired... 

The problem of finding necessary and sufficient conditions to decompose a complete tripartite graph K(r, s, t) into 5-cycles was first considered by Mahmoodian and Mirzakhani (1995). They stated some necessary conditions and conjectured that these conditions are also sufficient. Since then, many cases of the problem have been solved by various authors; however the case when the partite sets r ≤ s ≤ t have odd and distinct sizes remains open. A necessary condition is t ≤ 3r. Billington and Cavenagh (2011) have shown that when r, s, and t are all odd and r ≤ s ≤ t ≤ κr, where κ ≈ 1.0806, then the conjectured necessary conditions for decomposing are also sufficient. We extend this result... 

Graphene oxide nanoplatelets (GONPs) with extremely sharp edges (lateral dimensions ∼20-200 nm and thicknesses <2 nm) were applied in extraction of the overexpressed guanine synthesized in the cytoplasm of leukemia cells. The blood serums containing the extracted guanine were used in differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) with reduced graphene oxide nanowall (rGONW) electrodes to develop fast and ultra-sensitive electrochemical detection of leukemia cells at leukemia fractions (LFs) of ∼10-11 (as the lower detection limit). The stability of the DPV signals obtained by oxidation of the extracted guanine on the rGONWs was studied after 20 cycles. Without the guanine extraction, the DPV peaks... 

Specific and sensitive electroanalysis of blood-circulating protein cancer biomarkers is often complicated by interference from serum proteins nonspecifically adsorbing at the biosensing interface and masking specific reactions of interest. Here, we have developed an electrocatalytically amplified assay for specific and sensitive analysis of human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2/neu, a protein cancer biomarker over-expressed in breast cancers) that allows us to avoid both the interference from bovine serum albumin (BSA) and electrocatalytic amplification of the signal stemming from the specific aptamer−HER-2/neu binding. A HER-2/neu-specific thiolated aptamer sequence was... 

This paper presents a two layer texture modeling method to recognize architectural distortion in mammograms. We propose a method that models a Gaussian mixture on the Curvelet coefficients and the outputs of Spiculated Lesion Filters. The Curvelet transform and the Spiculated Lesion Filters have been applied to extract textural features of mammograms in literature. However the key difference between this study and the previous ones is that in our approach, a Gaussian mixture models the textural features extracted by the Curvelet transform and the Spiculated Lesion Filters. The results of the current study are shown in the form of accuracy and the area under the receiver operating... 

In this paper, we study the frost formation and growth at the walls of a duct with uniform wall temperature variation. The simulation is performed for laminar flow regime considering suitable semi-empirical models incorporated with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. The frost growth is considered to be normal to the duct surface. Since the duct aspect ratio is high, we perform our simulations in two-dimensional zones. To simulate the frost layer properly, we solve both the energy and mass balance equations implementing some semi-empirical correlations on the frost side. At this stage, we suitably predict the required heat flux value at the solid boundary and the heat transfer... 

In this work, we study the gas mixing behavior in a micro T-mixer using the direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) method. The gas mixing process is monitored through a T-mixer, which is fed by two different CO and N2 gases; flowing into the T-mixer through the upper and lower inlets. We investigate the effects of axial and lateral wall temperature gradients on the mixing evolution at different rarefaction levels. The achieved results show that any temperature difference between the channel walls would result in an increase in mixing length for the chosen wall temperature gradient ranges and the studies pressure cases. Our observations show that a positive temperature gradient toward the... 

Gupta et al. [J. Opt. Soc. Am. B. 24, No. 5 (2007)] have introduced a localized upward plasma density ramp to overcome the defocusing of a laser beam. We report that there are fundamental mistakes in their work. First, the density profile formula that they have introduced is dimensionally incorrect. Second, the calculated dielectric constant is wrong as well, which renders their main spot size equation and the quantitative results unacceptable, and it seriously falters the results of the self-focusing. We correctly derived a new equation of the spot size, and the computational curves are also presented  

Multiple human 3D pose estimation is a challenging task. It is mainly because of large variations in the scale and pose of humans, fast motions, multiple persons in the scene, and arbitrary number of visible body parts due to occlusion or truncation. Some of these ambiguities can be resolved by using multiview images. This is due to the fact that more evidences of body parts would be available in multiple views. In this work, a novel method for multiple human 3D pose estimation using evidences in multiview images is proposed. The proposed method utilizes a fully connected pairwise conditional random field that contains two types of pairwise terms. The first pairwise term encodes the spatial...