Sharif Digital Repository

Purpose: Drowsy driving accounts for many accidents and has attracted substantial research attention in recent years. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are shown to be a reliable measure for the early detection of drowsiness. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive study showing the applicability of drowsiness detection systems with EEG signals. In this research, we targeted the studies under the category of drowsiness detection, which adopted an EEG-based approach, to inspect the applicability of these systems from different aspects. Materials and Methods: We included documented studies that utilized clinical devices and consumer-grade EEG headsets for detection of drowsiness and... 

Electrochemical activity of TiO2 nanotube arrays (NTAs) is restricted by a wide band gap of TiO2. To overcome this restriction, we considered systematic research on two effective methods of doping of TiO2 NTAs such as the N-doping and electrochemical reductive doping and predicting the proper application of them. Band gap narrowing was occurred from 3.16 eV for undoped TiO2 NTAs to 2.9 and 2.7 eV at N-doped and self-doped TiO2 ones respectively. The electrochemical responses of the TiO2 NTAs before and after doping were examined by cyclic Voltammetry (CV) curve. To understand the electrochemical behavior of the undoped and doped TiO2 NTAs, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) was... 

Although morphological disorder of nanotube structure is further down than the nanoparticular electrode, its density of traps are the hindering effects in the charge transport. In this study, crack-free TiO2 nanotube membranes, which obtained through a re-anodizing process, are fixed on transparent fluorine–tin-oxide glass by applying a few drops of Titanium Isopropoxide without needing the TiO2 powder paste. Front-side illuminated dye sensitized solar cells fabricated by undoped, N-doped and blue TiO2 nanotube membranes are investigated. The electrical characteristics of TiO2 nanotube based dye sensitized solar cells are followed by theoretical analysis using simple one-diode model.... 

Carbazole compounds are p-type hole-transporting materials (HTMs) useful for perovskite solar cells (PSCs). In this work, we developed a new class of carbazol based HTMs; non-fused 3-D asymmetric structures (S14 and S12) as HTM of PSCs. To the best of our knowledge, there is no report on non-fused HTMs with a high glass transition temperature (Tg = 165 °C), which reduces crystallization and suppresses grain boundaries in glassy film, resulting in long-term durability. Experimental results show that tuning the carbazole moiety in S14 structure has a constructive influence on geometrical alignment, hole mobility, hydrophobicity, stability as well as efficiency. The resultant power conversion... 

Background: Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) is a health problem that is increasing around the world. Introduction: Prevention of GDM, rather than treatment, could have several benefits in terms of both health and economic cost. Even a slight reduction in maternal glucose in non-diabetic women, particularly in women at high risk for GDM, may have significant benefits for pregnancy results and the future health of off-springs. Probiotics are a relatively new intervention, which are assessed by mothers’ metabolism, and can reduce blood sugar levels, prevent gestational diabetes and reduce the maternal and fetal complications resulting from it. The aim of this study was to review the studies... 

This study was designed to compare one-step, two-step and spent medium bioleaching of spent catalyst by adapted Aspergillus niger in batch cultures. Aspergillus niger, which was adapted to heavy metal ions, Ni, Mo, Fe, and W, was grown in medium containing up to 5% (w/v) of spent catalyst. The main lixiviant in bioleaching was gluconic acid, which was produced at all pulp densities in the one-step bioleaching process. Gluconic acid was also produced in the two-step bioleaching process when the spent catalyst was present at pulp densities greater than 1% (w/v). In the spent medium leaching, however, the primary agent was citric acid. The pulp density of the spent catalyst was varied, and this... 

A novel recognition method for selective determination of the hyoscine N-Butyl bromide (HBB), an antispasmodic agent for smooth muscles, was devised using extended gate field-effect transistor (EG-FET) as transducing unit. For this purpose a PVC membrane, containing hyoscine n-butyl-tetraphenyl borate ion-pair as recognition component, was coated on Ag/AgCl wire, which was connected to the extended metal gate. In optimal conditions, the linear range for HBB was 10-8-10-5 molL−1 with limit of detection 1.7×10-9 molL-1. The proposed sensor was applied in real sample, it showed fast response with high accuracy, and therefore it could be used as HPLC detector in the pharmaceutical samples in... 

Multi-application execution in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), a promising way to utilize GPU resources, is still challenging. Some pieces of prior work (e.g., spatial multitasking) have limited opportunity to improve resource utilization, while other works, e.g., simultaneous multi-kernel, provide fine-grained resource sharing at the price of unfair execution. This paper proposes a new multi-application paradigm for GPUs, called NURA, that provides high potential to improve resource utilization and ensures fairness and Quality-of-Service (QoS). The key idea is that each streaming multiprocessor (SM) executes Cooperative Thread Arrays (CTAs) belong to only one application (similar to the... 

Lake Urmia, which was once the second-largest saline lake in the world, has been shrinking dramatically. Moreover, Lake Urmia has become supersaturated with total salinity averaging more than 350 g/l. Salt precipitation and dissolved materials brought by inflowing rivers have formed a layer of sediment with low hydraulic conductivity on the lakebed. Considering the flat bathymetry of Lake Urmia, we conducted a series of numerical simulation scenarios to study the groundwater flow pattern in the vicinity of the hypersaline Lake Urmia using COMSOL Multiphysics®. In the first step, we performed the simulations in steady-state conditions. Secondly, we simulated the lake level fall in 10 years at... 

Investigating the dynamic evolution of storage volume and salinity of Lake Urmia (LU), which is crucial to present more reliable estimations of water balance components, needs to be furthur studied. We aimed to fill this gap by developing a coupled lumped mathematical model that considered the two-way effect of salt and water balance components on each other. Through the coupled water and salt balance model, salt precipitation and dissolution components were incorporated, and vaporation was calculated dynamically based on the lake's salinity. The final model was then used as a tool to estimate the groundwater flux. Results indicated that during the lake shrinkage period (2009–2015),... 

In this study, nanostructured biodegradable pure Zn, Zn-4 wt. % Mn and Zn-24 wt % Mn alloys were produced by 20 h mechanical alloying and consequent cold pressing and sintering. Structural evolutions were investigated using the X-ray diffraction technique. Also, the microstructure was characterized by scanning electron microscopy. The effects of alloy composition on density, mechanical properties, corrosion behavior in Hank's solution, cell viability and cell attachment were investigated. Crystallite size of the synthesized alloys after 20 h of milling reached to less than 40 nm and remained less than 80 nm after consolidation and sintering for 1 h. Alloys contain MnZn13 as second phase... 

In feature-based image registration, feature selection and reduction methods play an important role in decreasing computational burden of these operations. In this paper, a new approach is introduced to reduce the dimension of extracted feature vectors of MR images. This approach is based on the selection of the maximum and minimum responses of the alpha stable filter for the MR images over the extracted features with different orientation in frequency domain. This algorithm selects the rotation invariant features which are suitable for image registration purposes. It has been shown that these features could efficiently describe the image elements. The discriminating ability of the features... 

Iran as one of the countries located on the Alpine-Himalayan seismic belt has recently experienced a few number of catastrophic earthquakes. A well-known index of how buildings are affected by earthquakes is through assessment of probable Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) and structures' response spectra. In this research, active faults around Kerman and Birjand, two major cities in eastern parts of Iran, have been considered. Seismic catalogues are gathered to categorize effects of surrounding faults on seismicity of the region. These catalogues were further refined with respect to time and space based on Knopoff-Gardner algorithm in order to increase statistical independency of events.... 

This paper introduces a new method for improving the inertial navigation system errors using information provided by the camera. An unscented Kalman filter is used for integrating the inertial measurement unit data with the features’ constraints extracted from the camera’s image. The constraints, in our approach, comprise epipolar geometry of two consecutive images with more than 65% coverage. Tracking down a known feature in two consecutive images results in emergence of stochastic epipolar constraint. It emerges in the form of an implicit measurement equation of the Kalman filter. Correctly matching features of the two images is necessary for reducing the navigation system errors because... 

The novel mixed ligand complexes [M(bpy)(phen-dione)](PF6)2 (M = Zn(II), Cd(II) and Hg(II), bpy = 2,2′-bipyridine and phen-dione = 1,10-phenanthroline-5,6-dione) have been synthesized and characterized by elemental analysis, IR, 1H NMR and electronic absorption spectroscopies. The ν(C=O) of coordinated phen-dione in these complexes are very similar to the free phen-dione ligand showing that phen-dione is not coordinated to metal ion from its C=O sites. Absorption spectra of the complexes show two absorption bands for intraligand transitions. These absorption bands show dependence to the dielectric constant of solvent. These complexes exhibit an intensive fluorescence band around 535 nm in... 

The mononuclear complexes of Zn(II), Cd(II) and Hg(II), [Zn(phen-dione)Cl2], [Cd(phen-dione)Cl2] and [Hg(phen-dione)Cl2], where phen-dione = 1,10-phenanthroline-5,6-dione, have been synthesized and characterized by elemental analysis and IR, 1H NMR and electronic absorption spectroscopies. The ν(C=O) of coordinated phen-dione ligands in these complexes shows that the phen-dione is not coordinated to metal ion from its C=O sites. Electronic spectra of the complexes show two absorption bands for intraligand transitions. These absorption bands show dependence on the dielectric constant of solvents. These complexes exhibit an intense fluorescence band around 545 nm in DMSO when the excitation... 

Purpose - This paper aims to develop an adaptive unscented Kalman filter (AUKF) formulation for orientation estimation of aircraft and UAV utilizing low-cost attitude and heading reference systems (AHRS). Design/methodology/approach - A recursive least-square algorithm with exponential age weighting in time is utilized for estimation of the unknown inputs. The proposed AUKF tunes its measurement covariance to yield optimal performance. Owing to nonlinear nature of the dynamic model as well as the measurement equations, an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is chosen against the extended Kalman filter, due to its better performance characteristics. The unscented transformation of the UKF is shown...