Sharif Digital Repository

Needle insertion simulation and planning systems (SPSs) will play an important role in diminishing inappropriate insertions into soft tissues and resultant complications. Difficulties in SPS development are due in large part to the computational requirements of the extensive calculations in finite element (FE) models of tissue. For clinical feasibility, the computational speed of SPSs must be improved. At the same time, a realistic model of tissue properties that reflects large and velocity-dependent deformations must be employed. The purpose of this study is to address the aforementioned difficulties by presenting a cost-effective SPS platform for needle insertions into the liver. The study... 

In this study, the corrosion behaviour of Ni-Co alloys with low Co content, electroplated on steel substrate in sulphate bath, was investigated. The morphology of coatings was studied by optical and SEM microscopy. The corrosion products were analyzed using EDX. The results showed that Ni-1%Co coatings had a better corrosion resistance 0.30, 0.92 and 3.75 mpy for atmospheric, salt spray and polarization tests, respectively. These are 0.41, 1.20 and 5.40 mpy for pure nickel coatings that indicate the least corrosion resistance. Surface analysis revealed the presence of oxides, sulphides and chlorides in corrosion products  

Veronica genus (Plantaginaceae) is broadly distributed in different habitats. In this study, the inhibitory activity of free soluble and conjugated phenolic extracts of Veronica persica on key enzymes associated to type 2 diabetes (α-glucosidase and α-amylase) and hypertension (angiotensin I converting enzyme, ACE) was assessed, as well as their antioxidant power. Our results showed that both the extracts inhibited α-amylase, α-glucosidase and ACE in a dose-dependent manner. In particular, free phenolic extract significantly (P < 0.05) inhibited α-glucosidase (IC50 532.97 μg/mL), whereas conjugated phenolic extract significantly (P < 0.05) inhibited a-amylase (IC50 489.73 μg/mL) and ACE... 

In naturally fractured reservoirs, modeling of mass transfer between matrix blocks and fractures is an important subject during gas injection or contaminant transport. This study focuses on developing an exact analytical solution to transient tracer transport problem along a discrete fracture in a porous rock matrix. Using Gauss-Legendre quadrature, an expression was obtained in the form of a double integral which is considered as the general transient solution. This solution has the ability to account the following phenomena: advective transport in fractures and molecular diffusion from the fracture to the matrix block. Certain assumptions are made which allow the problem to be formulated... 

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors. Some parts of this paper are similar to the following previously-published paper, but do not include appropriate citation: Amin Sharifi Haddad, Hassan Hassanzadeh, Jalal Abedi; Advective-diffuse mass tranfer in fractured porous media with variable rock matrix block size; Journal of Contaminant Hydrology, Volume 133, 15 May 2012, Pages 94–107. DOI: 10.1016/j.jconhyd.2012.02.008. The Authors apologise unreservedly for this violation of publishing policies, and for any... 

Lithium ion batteries as one of the most important energy storage equipments, have several challenges including capacity drop as number of cycles increases. Cathode particle coating is an effective approach in improvement of electrochemical performance of the batteries. In this study, TiO2-Ag coating was used to improve NCM cathode performance. The microstructure and crystal structure properties of coated NCMs were evaluated by the FE-SEM and XRD. Electrochemical behavior of the batteries was investigated by cycling performance analysis and EIS. TiO2 coating was deposited as a uniform layer and Ag coating was precipitated as dispersed nanoparticles. The results shows that using of TiO2-Ag... 

Interaction between rock-fluid and fluid-fluid can have a significant effect on oil recovery. Changing the wettability of reservoir rock toward more water-wet or less oil-wet state is one of the expected mechanisms during low salinity water injection (LSWI). pH and salinity are of the most eminent factors of injection water controlling the wettability state of a crude oil/brine/rock system during any waterflooding operation. A small change in pH can affect the surface charges at the rock/water and oil/water interfaces leading to wettability alteration in a porous medium. In this study, the synergic effect of salinity and pH on the wettability state of carbonate rocks is evaluated through... 

Carbonaceous radioactive waste is produced by adsorption of effluent gases of UF6 production line, on a bed of charcoal. Current research was aimed at developing a process for recovery of uranium from this waste in a laboratory and at pilot scale. As a first step, leaching of uranium from carbonaceous radioactive waste was undertaken by successive steps using Al(NO3)3 and nitric acid, the former used to eliminate corrosivity of the F− ions. The stoichiometry of reaction between F− and Al3+ ions form complexes ranging from AlF2+, AlF2+ to AlF3 depending upon their molar ratio. The results showed that the increase of NO3−/U ratio increased the uranium leaching efficiency. Presence of some... 

In recent years, robotic rehabilitation has been utilized in treatment and recovery of patients with disabilities. In this paper, a novel design and kinematic analysis of a 4-DOF robot for upper-limb rehabilitation are proposed. The main novelty of this design is its mechanism for wrist and fingers motions which is added to the shoulder and elbow mechanism without any noticeable weight increase in the moving parts of the robot. For this purpose, a cable driven mechanism is implemented at the robot end-effector to move the wrist and fingers parts, and the corresponding actuators are placed at the base of the robot. © 2018 IEEE  

In this paper, we propose a new 6-round Related-Key Impossible Differential property of AES-256 and two related-key impossible differential attacks on 7 and 9 round AES-256, based on the proposed property. The overall complexity of the proposed 7 round attack is decreased by the factor 217. This is for the first time that a Related-Key Impossible Differential attack on 9-round AES-256 is successful. Also this is the first related-key attack on 9-round AES-256 that needs only 2 keys. Although the data and time complexities of the attack are approximately code book and exhaustive search, but we think the proposed property will be useful in future research like boomerang and rectangle attacks  

A new heuristic filter, called firefly filter, is proposed for state estimation of nonlinear stochastic systems. The new filter formulates the state estimation problem as a stochastic dynamic optimization and utilizes the firefly optimization algorithm to find and track the best estimation. The fireflies search the state space dynamically and are attracted to one other based on the perceived brightness. The performance of the proposed filter is evaluated for a set of benchmarks and the results are compared with the well-known filters like extended Kalman filter and particle filter, showing improvements in terms of estimation accuracy. © 2016 IEEE  

The lazy bureaucrat scheduling is a new class of scheduling problems that was introduced in [1]. In these problems, there is one employee (or more) who should perform the assigned jobs. The objective of the employee is to minimize the amount of work he performs and to be as inefficient as possible. He is subject to a constraint, however, that he should be busy when there is some work to do. In this paper, we focus on the cases of this problem where all jobs have the same common deadline. We show that with this constraint, the problem is still NP-hard, and prove some hardness results. We then present a tight 2-approximation algorithm for this problem under one of the defined objective... 

Diffusivity equation which can provide us with the pressure distribution, is a Partial Differential Equation (PDE) describing fluid flow in porous media. The quadratic pressure gradient term in the diffusivity equation is nearly neglected in hydrology and petroleum engineering problems such as well test analysis. When a compressible liquid is injected into a well at high pressure gradient or when the reservoir possess a small permeability value, the effect of ignoring this term increases. In such cases, neglecting this parameter can result in high errors. Previous models basically focused on numerical and semi-analytical methods for semi-infinite domain. To the best of our knowledge, no... 

This paper presents a precise solution to predict the behavior of steel fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) under the four point bending test (FPBT). All the force components at the beam section (before and after cracking) are formulated by applying these assumptions: a realistic stress-strain model is used for concrete behavior in compression, a linear response is considered for the uncracked tension region in a concrete constitutive model, and an exponential relationship is proposed as a stress-crack opening in the crack region which requires two parameters. Then the moment capacity of the critical cracked section is calculated by using these forces and satisfying equilibrium law at the... 

Demand response (DR) and flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) devices can be effectively used for congestion management in power transmission systems. However, demand response program (DRP) implementation can itself affect the optimum location of FACTS devices, which is one of the main issues in power system planning. This paper investigates the impact of DRPs on unified power flow controller (UPFC) placement. The harmony search algorithm is employed to determine the optimum locations and parameter setting of UPFC in a long-term framework. The optimization problem is solved with different objectives including generation and congestion cost reduction, as well as loss reduction. In this... 

In this paper, using an analytical optimization method, optimum design of multi-layer compound cylinders with different materials in layers is investigated. For this purpose, considering Tresca criterion, maximum shear stress in each layer is minimized. At the optimum condition, the maximum shear stress at all layers occurs simultaneously. The general analytical relations for optimum dimension of layers, residual pressures and radial interferences are derived. The existence condition of the optimum solution is also investigated and the constraints for materials selection are derived too. It is shown that the allowable shear stress ratio of materials must be close to their geometric mean... 

In this paper, employing an analytical method, optimum design of multi-layer compound cylinders is investigated. To this end, considering Tresca criterion, maximum shear stress in each layer is minimized. Analytical relations for optimum values of a layer dimension, residual pressures and radial interferences are derived. A technique for shrink-fitting of layers is also proposed and relationships for radial interferences, residual pressures and required temperature differences during the shrink-fitting process are derived. Three different examples are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. It is shown that increasing the number of layers makes shear stress distribution... 

In this paper, the three-dimensional adaptive finite element modeling is presented for cohesive fracture analysis of non-planer crack growth. The technique is performed based on the Zienkiewicz-Zhu error estimator by employing the modified superconvergent patch recovery procedure for the stress recovery. The Espinosa-Zavattieri bilinear constitutive equation is used to describe the cohesive tractions and displacement jumps. The 3D cohesive fracture element is employed to simulate the crack growth in a non-planar curved pattern. The crack growth criterion is proposed in terms of the principal stress and its direction. Finally, several numerical examples are analyzed to demonstrate the... 

Optimal trajectory and muscle forces of a human-like musculoskeletal arm are predicted for planar point-to-point movements using optimal control theory. The central nervous system (CNS) is modeled as an optimal controller that performs a reaching motion to final states via minimization of an objective function. For the CNS strategy, a cubic function of muscles stresses is considered as an appropriate objective function that minimizes muscles fatigue. A two-DOF nonlinear musculoskeletal planar arm model with four states and six muscle actuators is used for the evaluation of the proposed optimal strategy. The nonlinear variational formulation of the corresponding optimal control problem is... 

Anti-reflection and self-cleaning coatings on the glass substrate are used to improve the performance of solar systems. TiO2 are one of the most used semiconductors for this application. In this research meso-porous TiO2 coatings (that synthesized by the sol-gel process) with the various extent of porosity (using different concentrations of Pluronic F127, as pore-forming agent) have been investigated. The coating's thickness and porosity and anti-reflective properties were studied by FE-SEM and UV/VIS spectrometer (transmission spectra test), respectively. It was found that the use of F127 leads to the formation of pores smaller than 30 nm and increases the surface roughness from 1.5 (for...