Sharif Digital Repository

Background: Numerous studies have described the neuroprotective effect of lithium in spinal cord injury in addition to its ameliorative impact on pain sensation. In the present study, we aim to examine the efficacy of 85 mg/kg as well as 50 mg/kg dosage of the lithium chloride (LiCl) through oral consumption in spinal cord injured rats and their effect on gene expression of three candidate genes, corresponding to the hyper-sensitization. Methods: Adult Wistar (male) rats were divided into four experimental groups: control; oral administration of LiCl with 85 mg/kg and 50 mg/kg dosage; and 10 % sucrose receiver as the vehicle. BBB and heat plantar tests were performed weekly throughout four... 

The development of high performance supercapacitors with high energy densities without sacrificing power densities has always been at the leading edge of the emerging field of renewable energy. Herein, the design and fabrication of innovative high performance binder-free electrodes consisting of coiled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and biomass-derived hydrothermal carbon spheres (HTCSs) as, respectively, positive and negative electrodes is reported. High performance asymmetric supercapacitors (ASCs) were developed using novel 3D core/shell-like binary Ni-Co oxide (NCO) decorated coiled CNTs directly grown on Ni nano-cone arrays (NCAs) and HTCSs directly deposited on NCAs. Novel 3D structures of... 

Stroke, as a major cause of disability, is one of the most frequent medical diagnoses in Iran and worldwide. Iran is an upper-middle-income country and has an incidence of stroke of around 100,000 new cases annually. A considerable percentage of stroke incidents leads to neurological and sensorimotor disabilities. Thus neurorehabilitation is essential for stroke survivors to optimize functional recovery. We first present a statistical analysis and demographic data on the aging society, and one major diagnosis, stroke. Then, the healthcare system approaches and the prevailing trends and methods of therapy for stroke patients are introduced. Later, the adoption of neurorehabilitation and... 

Low Grade Heat Driven Multi-effect Distillation and Desalination describes the development of advanced multi-effect evaporation technologies that are driven by low grade sensible heat, including process waste heat in refineries, heat rejection from diesel generators or microturbines, and solar and geothermal energy. The technologies discussed can be applied to desalination in remote areas, purifying produced water in oil-and-gas industries, and to re-concentrate process liquor in refineries.
This book is ideal for researchers, engineering scientists, graduate students, and industrial practitioners working in the desalination, petrochemical, and mineral refining sectors, helping them... 

The unsaturated small strain shear modulus, Gmax, is a key reference value in predicting relationships between dynamic shear modulus and shear strain amplitude and is thus a key quantity to properly model the behavior of dynamically-loaded geotechnical systems such as pavements, rail beds, and machine foundations. From the interpretation of the experimental Gmax results for unsaturated soils, different definitions of trends between Gmax and the stress state of the unsaturated soils and material properties are proposed. However, in most of trends, the relationship between the stress state and void ratio is considered and the effect of void ratio on the unsaturated small strain shear modulus... 

Speech enhancement in real-time applications improves the quality and intelligibility of the speech and reduces communication fatigue. Nowadays, due to reactivity of the systems and spread of online real-time applications, including VoIP, state-space models have been used broadly. This paper presents a speech enhancement method based on adaptive Bayesian-Kalman filter and Bayesian-MAP estimation to improve the performance and the quality of the enhancement procedure. The enhancement method includes a combination of Bayesian-Kalman filter for noise reduction and Bayesian-MAP estimation for parameter estimation of the lost speech segments. Performance evaluation and result of the proposed... 

Corrosion of lead silicate glass (LSG) contacting 0.5 M aqueous nitric acid (HNO 3) was investigated via scanning electron microscopy, energy-dispersive spectroscopy, inductively coupled plasma analysis, and weight-loss measurement to determine the respective contributions of the ion-exchange vs. the hydrolysis reactions. The LSG having X M ≡ Pb+K+Na/Si mole ratios of less than 0.7 showed very little weight loss with no Si network deterioration. At X M > 0.7, the mechanism changed into the hydrolysis, which caused the formation of a networkless gel layer resting at the solid/liquid interface. Addition of titania (TiO 2) and zirconia (ZrO 2) had disparate effects: X M < 0.7 improved corrosion... 

Presence of bubbles affects quality of the lead silicate glass (LSG) samples. This paper presents the most recent results obtained on formation and collapse of bubbles in LSG melts. Main sources of the bubbles are dissolved gases and redox reactions. A foamy layer full of bubbles rapidly forms at top of the molten phase. Effect of viscosity and density of the melt on content and ascension rate of the bubbles are investigated. Number and mean diameter of the bubbles and thickness of the top bubbly layer are calculated from gas volume measurements and image analysis via J software  

The design of 3-dimensional (3-D) nanostructured materials on the novel current collectors has recently considered as a promising strategy for developing high-performance supercapacitors. Herein, in the first step, a novel 3-D nickel nanocone arrays (NCAs) are synthesized on the surface of nickel plate (NP) by a one-step electrodeposition method without using any template (NCAs-NP). Then, a simple and efficient method is developed for fabricating ternary metal sulfides electrodes based on the electrodeposition of nickel cobalt iron sulfide (Ni-Co-Fe-S) ultrathin nanosheets on the surface of NCAs-NP. Taking advantages of the unique flower like structure of Ni-Co-Fe-S ultrathin nanosheets and... 

A major problem in real-time packet-based communication systems, is misrouted or delayed packets which results in degraded perceived voice quality. If packets are not available on time, the packets are considered as lost. The easiest solution in a network terminal receiver is to replace silence for the duration of lost speech segments. In a high quality communication system, to avoid degradation in speech quality due to packet loss, a suitable method or algorithm is needed to replace the missing segments of speech. In this paper, we introduce an adaptive filter for replacement of lost speech segment. In this method Kalman filter as a state-space based method will be used to predict the clean... 

High-temperature (1200-1350°C) corrosion of fused-cast ZrO2-Al2O3-SiO2 (ZAS) refractory contacting lead silicate glass melt (LSG) containing 68.5wt% PbO was investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), x-ray diffraction (XRD), thickness measurement and Archimedes density measurement. ZAS durability was improved by baddeliyete content and deteriorated with open porosity proportion, corundum percentage and eutectic mixture presence. Diffusion of lead resulted in fusion-temperature lowering of the glassy layers embedded within the ZAS particles. Heating caused viscosity drop across the interface, loosening the... 

Node localization is of paramount importance to different wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. This paper investigates the received signal strength (RSS) based localization problem with unknown path-loss model parameters. Most works in RSS localization assume the transmit power and path-loss exponent (PLE) are known that is not a realistic assumption in some cases. However this paper, assumes the transmit power and the PLE are both unknown and a novel algorithm for sensor location is proposed. The algorithm is based on the generalized total least-squares (GTLS) method and gives an explicit solution for the localization problem. The performance of the proposed method is compared with... 

In this research, we used the scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) technique to probe the local electrical properties of the surface of meso-porous silicon and its substrate, including local density of states (DOS) in air and in methanol environment to increase our knowledge of sensing phenomena. Meso-porous silicon was prepared on p+-type Si which has high sensitivity toward methanol. Observations revealed that while the surface electrical properties of p+-type Si have not sensible change toward methanol, average local density of state of the porous layer increases after the exposure to methanol especially in the E < EF region. Moreover, large number of surface states is produced in band... 

This paper presents a novel algorithm for detection of singular points, the core and delta points, in fingerprint images. The number and location of singular points, are used to classify fingerprint images into five general groups; and therefore to narrow down the search space in large fingerprint databases. Using the proposed directional masks in the first step, we detect the neighborhood of the singular points. In the second stage by implementing the proposed algorithm, an adaptive singular point detection method, is designed to extract the exact location of core and delta points. Usage of the proposed directional masks speeds up the process and the proposed adaptive singular point... 

The control of a brachiation robot has been the primary objective of this study. A brachiating robot is a type of a mobile arm that is capable of moving from branch to branch similar to a long-armed ape. In this paper, to minimize the actuator work, Pontryagin's minimum principle was used to obtain the optimal trajectories for two different problems. The first problem considers “brachiation between fixed branches with different distance and height,” whereas the second problem deals with the “brachiating and catching of a moving target branch”. Theoretical results show that the control effort in the proposed method is reduced by 25% in comparison with the “target dynamics” method which was... 

This book focuses on a central question in the field of complex systems: Given a fluctuating (in time or space), uni- or multi-variant sequentially measured set of experimental data (even noisy data), how should one analyse non-parametrically the data, assess underlying trends, uncover characteristics of the fluctuations (including diffusion and jump contributions), and construct a stochastic evolution equation?
Here, the term "non-parametrically" exemplifies that all the functions and parameters of the constructed stochastic evolution equation can be determined directly from the measured data.
The book provides an overview of methods that have been developed for the analysis of... 

We use multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) to study the electrical discharge current fluctuations in plasma and show that it has multifractal properties and behaves as a weak anti-correlated process. Comparison of the MF-DFA results for the original series with those for the shuffled and surrogate series shows that correlation of the fluctuations is responsible for the multifractal nature of the electrical discharge current  

Using the Markovian method, we study the stochastic nature of electrical discharge current fluctuations in the Helium plasma. Sinusoidal trends are extracted from the data set by the Fourier-Detrended Fluctuation analysis and consequently cleaned data is retrieved. We determine the Markov time scale of the detrended data set by using likelihood analysis. We also estimate the Kramers-Moyal's coefficients of the discharge current fluctuations and derive the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation. In addition, the obtained Langevin equation enables us to reconstruct discharge time series with similar statistical properties compared with the observed in the experiment. We also provide an exact... 

We use multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) to study the electrical discharge current fluctuations in plasma and show that it has multifractal properties and behaves as a weak anti-correlated process. Comparison of the MF-DFA results for the original series with those for the shuffled and surrogate series shows that correlation of the fluctuations is responsible for the multifractal nature of the electrical discharge current. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd. and SISSA