Sharif Digital Repository

Low back pain (LBP), the leading cause of disability worldwide, remains one of the most common and challenging problems in occupational musculoskeletal disorders. The effective assessment of LBP injury risk, and the design of appropriate treatment modalities and rehabilitation protocols, require accurate estimation of the mechanical spinal loads during different activities. This study aimed to: (1) develop a novel 2D beam-column finite element control-based model of the lumbar spine and compare its predictions for muscle forces and spinal loads to those resulting from a geometrically matched equilibrium-based model; (2) test, using the foregoing control-based finite element model, the... 

A carboxylate gadolinium-based metal-organic framework (Gd-MOF) is an exceptional candidate for magnetic resonance imaging agents, but its low drug adsorption capacity hinders this MOF from being used as a theragnostic agent. In this work, the Gd-MOF was synthesized by a simple solvothermal method. Then, different activation situations, including various solvents over different time periods, were applied to enhance the specific surface area of the synthesized MOF. Different characterization analyses such as X-ray diffraction and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller along with experimental quercetin adsorption tests were done to study the crystalline and physical properties of various activated MOFs. In... 

Wall thickness measurement and deterioration determination of 6 and 10 inch pipes due to corrosion/erosion/pitting was evaluated by using radiographic film density measurements. Special reference blocks were prepared with defined step wall reductions and artificial defects. Gamma radiography with a Ir-192 source was used. A double-wall technique with longitudinal film arrangement was used for this purpose. Formulae were developed from the experiments for numerical calculations. It was observed that this method can determine remaining wall thickness as well as pitting corrosion in insulated and non-insulated pipes with differential and absolute density measurements. The purpose of the work... 

The secure hash algorithm (SHA)-3 has been selected in 2012 and will be used to provide security to any application which requires hashing, pseudo-random number generation, and integrity checking. This algorithm has been selected based on various benchmarks such as security, performance, and complexity. In this paper, in order to provide reliable architectures for this algorithm, an efficient concurrent error detection scheme for the selected SHA-3 algorithm, i.e., Keccak, is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, effective countermeasures for potential reliability issues in the hardware implementations of this algorithm have not been presented to date. In proposing the error detection... 

Today the need for fault diagnosis in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) is felt more than ever to increase the useful life and durability of the cell. The present study proposes an indirect in-situ experimental-based algorithm for diagnosing the moisture content issues in a three-cell stack. Three adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) approximate the system outputs (cells voltages, cathodic and anodic pressure drop) in normal conditions. The values of Pearson's correlation coefficients (0.998, 0.983, and 0.995 for outputs, respectively) show the high quality of the modeling. In unknown operating conditions, the residuals of experimental and ANFIS values are compared... 

The acidity and stability constants of M (MNPPAP) (MNPPAP: 2((4-methyl-5-nitro-6-(pyrrolidine-l-yl)pyrimidine-2-yl)amino)propionic acid) M: Cu2+, Cu (Bpy)2+ (Bpy: 2,2'-Bipyridine), or Cu(Phen) (Phen: 1,10-Phenanthroline) complexes were determined by potentiometric pH titration. It is shown that the stability of the binary Cu (MNPPAP) complex is determined by the basicity of the carboxylate group on one side and amine group on the other side. It is demonstrated that the equilibrium, Cu(Har)2+ (H ar: Heteroaromatic ligand such as Bpy or Phen) + Cu(MNPPAP) ^ Cu(Har)(MNPPAP) + Cu2+, is displacement due to the well known experience that mixed ligand complexes formed by a divalent 3d ion, a... 

Recently, it is shown that, if D is a finite-dimensional division ring, then GLn(D) is not finitely generated. Our object here is to provide a general framework for the groups of units of left Artinian rings. We prove that, if R is an infinite F-algebra of finite dimension over F, then U(R) is not finitely generated. We show that any infinite subnormal subgroup of GL n (D) has no finite maximal subgroup. Also, we prove that for any infinite left Artinian ring R, U(R) has no finite maximal subgroup, which is a result analogous to that for rings. © Inst. Math. CAS 2002  

In this paper we study the structure of locally solvable, solvable, locally nilpotent, and nilpotent maximal subgroups of skew linear groups. In [S. Akbari et al., J. Algebra 217 (1999) 422-433] it has been conjectured that if D is a division ring and M a nilpotent maximal subgroup of D*, then D is commutative. In connection with this conjecture we show that if F[M]F contains an algebraic element over F, then M is an abelian group. Also we show that ℂ* ∪ ℂ*j is a solvable maximal subgroup of real quaternions and so give a counterexample to Conjecture 3 of [S. Akbari et al., J. Algebra 217 (1999) 422-433], which states that if D is a division ring and M a solvable maximal subgroup of D* then... 

The process of local scour around bridge piers is fundamentally complex due to the three-dimensional flow patterns interacting with bed materials. For geotechnical and economical reasons, multiple pile bridge piers have become more and more popular in bridge design. Although many studies have been carried out to develop relationships for the maximum scour depth at pile groups under clear-water scour condition, existing methods do not always produce reasonable results for scour predictions. It is partly due to the complexity of the phenomenon involved and partly because of limitations of the traditional analytical tool of statistical regression. This paper addresses the latter part and... 

Energy efficiency is one of the main pathways for energy security and environmental protection. In fact, the International Energy Agency asserts that without energy efficiency, 70% of targeted emission reductions are not achievable. Despite this clarity, enhancing the energy efficiency introduce significant challenge toward process operation. The reason is that the methods applied for energy-saving pose the process operation at the intersection of safety constraints. The present research aims at uncovering the trade-off between safe operation and energy efficiency; an optimization framework is developed that ensures process safety and simultaneously optimizes energy-efficiency, quantified in... 

In order to improve the performance of a newly developed radiochromic film, GIC-79, some dosimetric characteristics of this film have been studied based on relevant standard practice. The present study describes some parameters that may affect the dosimeter response before, during, and after irradiation. The effect of absorbed dose rate on dosimeter response was determined by irradiating dosimeters at low absorbed dose rates with gamma rays. Calibration irradiations of dosimeters were performed with both gamma rays and also electrons to determine the effect of large difference absorbed dose rates on dosimeter response. In addition, post irradiation stability was obtained and also the... 

This paper presents a novel stochastic planning framework for the integration of renewable distributed energy resources (DERs) into existing power systems without relying on new investments in the transmission networks. The upper-level problem of the proposed model aims at minimizing the total expected social cost of supplying demand that includes the expected cost of getting energy from conventional generating units and DERs, the congestion cost of transmission networks, and the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission cost, while each of the privately invested DER satisfies a specified rate of return. The lower-level problem clears the electricity market to find locational marginal prices (LMPs) and... 

Augmenting the security of cryptographic algorithms by protecting them against side-channel active attacks (and natural faults) is essential in cryptographic engineering. BLAKE algorithm is an efficient hash function which has been developed based on Bernstein's ChaCha stream cipher. Because of the fact that Google has chosen ChaCha along with Bernstein's Poly1305 message authentication code as a replacement for RC4 in TLS for Internet security, BLAKE's implementation is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present high-performance fault detection schemes for BLAKE. Specifically, for the round function, two fault diagnosis approaches are developed and analyzed in terms of error... 

This paper presents an approach that integrates clinical methods with Neuro-Fuzzy system in order to diagnose Neonatal Jaundice in newborns. First, a fuzzy logic system designed with medical rules to model the uncertainty that exists in medical diagnosis. Then a fuzzy neural network with an evolutionary learning helps the system to learn the new data gained from the patient and to help the fuzzy system to update itself in an online manner. By combining the aforementioned systems, the proposed approach can help physicians to diagnose jaundice with low risk cost associated with this disease. © 2006 IEEE  

The main concern of steganography (image hiding) methods is to embed a secret image into a host image in such a way that it causes minimum distortion to the host; to make it possible to extract a version of secret image from the host in such a way that the extracted version of secret image be as similar as possible to its original version (this should be possible even after usual attacks on the host image), and to provide ways of embedding secret images with larger size into a given host image. In this paper we propose a method that covers all above mentioned concerns by suggesting the idea of finding from an image data base, the most suitable host for a given secret image. In our method,... 

The main concern of steganography (image hiding) methods is to embed a secret image into a host image in such a way that the host should remain as similar as possible to its original version. In addition the host image should remain robust with respect to usual attacks. In this paper we present a method that tries to cover all above mentioned concerns. The secret and host images are divided into blocks of size 4 × 4. Each block in secret image is taken as a texture pattern for which the most similar block is found among the blocks of the host image. The embedding procedure is carried on by replacing these small blocks of the secret image with blocks in host image in such a way that least...