Sharif Digital Repository

The objective of this research is to design a drug delivery system that allows anti-inflammatory drugs to be injected directly into the joint (intra-articular injection) for the treatment of arthritis so that reduce the side effects associated with oral consumption of these drugs, increase the duration of drug retention in the joint environment, and reduce the side effects caused by repeated injections while improving effectiveness. To achieve this, first, desirable features were determined by considering the anatomy of the joint environment, the biological changes caused by the disease, and reviewing published articles and commercial products in the field; appropriate drug and raw materials... 

In today’s competitive world, using an efficient forecast method is necessity for companies. To now, many forecast methods have been developed, but many of them have not an expected efficiency. In this research, we develop a new hybrid forecast method with application of forecasting retails demand. The hybrid method is the combination of ARIMA method and neural networks. To test the efficiency of the method we use the 96 weeks data of plastic containers demand. We also comprise the hybrid method with other forecast methods including naïve method, ARIMA method and neural network method by applying root mean square error and mean absolute percentage error indexes. In the case of plastic... 

Flows which density difference in a gravity field is their driven force are called Density Currents. Such flows are present in both nature and man made environments. Due to their importance, there have been large efforts to analyse them in both experimental and numerical way. In the present thesis, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is introduced as a new tool to simulate such flows. As the method is Lagrangian and particle based, simulation of Density Currents with particles can be addressed more naturally that can be accounted as the method preference to traditional mesh based methods. SPH projection method is incorporated to impose incompressibility. To precisely simulate Density... 

Today, obesity, as a major global health challenge, affects more than 30 percent of the world's population. To investigate the effect of obesity on spinal function, a common method is motion analysis (kinematic method). This method is based on the claim that the abnormal mechanical function of the spine is directly related to its abnormal motions.The aim of this study is to measure and compare the range of motions (RoMs) of different segments of the spine in all anatomical plates between obese and normal individuals, as well as to calculate and compare some motion rhythms between the lumbar spine and the pelvis in these two groups. Comparing the posture of the spine between obese and normal... 

Studying the dynamics of vesicles in simple shear flow is the first step to decipher the dynamics of cells in flows or the motion of vesicle-based nanoparticles in vessels for drug delivery. The deformation of vesicle in shear flow changes the permeability of its membrane and may lead to its rupture, both of which correlate with the transportation of vesicle cargos to their environment, especially important in drug delivery. The deformation of vesicles in shear flow not only depends on the physical properties of the whole system, such as temperature, but also on the mechanical properties of three media: vesicle membrane plus vesicle’s inner and outer fluid. The effect of the mechanical... 

Distinguishing the structure of DNA is of outmost importance in the medicine and agriculture industry nowadays. Various methods have been suggested so far; however, high costs, incorrect results, and time-taking process are among main defects of them. Scientists try to find new ways for recognizing DNA structure and system in order to overcome such problems. One of these new methods is absorbing and passing DNA through Nano-pores in an electrolyte solution under the influence of an electrical field. The basis of this method is the ionized currents which occur due to the passing of DNA through Nano-pores. Because each DNA base pairs can form a barrier corresponding to a unique measured value,... 

In this study, polyoxometalate (POM) intercalated in the layered double hydroxide (LDH) was synthesized by a selective ion-exchange method. For this purpose, the nanocluster [VW12O40]3- was immobilized on the Mg2+/A13+/Cl–LDH support. The heterogeneous catalyst was characterized by FT-IR, XRD, SEM and analysis of ICP. The LDH-POM was applied as a catalyst in efficient oxidation of sulfides to sulfoxides using UHP as oxidant and CH3OH/ CH¬2¬Cl¬2 ¬as a solvent at room temperature, as well as epoxidation of olefins using TBHP as an oxidants and C¬2H4Cl2 as a solvent in 84°C. This catalyst showed excellent catalytic activities for a substrate/catalyst ratio (200:1). For example, this catalytic... 

In this thesis, the star formation history and evolution of IC 1613 dwarf galaxy and NGC 5128 giant elliptical galaxy has been studied. About IC 1613, our result shows that the star formation history of the galaxy is roughly constant in 5 Gyr ago and this support that the galaxy had been isolated at least in 5 Gyr ago. About NGC 5128, we can see that the star formation rate has suddenly increased in 700 Myr and 3.5 Gyr ago. This results in very good agreement with literature support that the galaxy has experienced some mergers with smaller gas rich galaxies  

In this research, the synthesis of the electrospum nano fiber doped zinc oxide and its photocatalyst usage was investigated. The band gap of the zinc oxide in the area of UV leads to deactivation of this material at the visible light. With due the attention to sunny weather in Iran and the fact that about 50 percentage of sunlight is visible light, producing and usage of catalyst materials actived at visible light is economical. Doping is one of the ways of activating ZnO at visible light, so in this research thiourea is used as the source of ZnO doping. The results of the expriments done at visible light and also spectrums of DRS, XPS and XRD prove that the doping is happened. Also, in this... 

Despite many advantages of granular sludge in anaerobic reactors (e.g. UASB), over the past few years research attention had turned towards developing aerobic granular sludge. Although much research is carried out on the formation of aerobic granules, less work is reported on how to enhance granules characteristics such as increasing in granule size, concentration, durability and stability. The aims of this study are to investigate the effects of cationic polymer on granule formation and the way to improve granule characteristics. For this purpose two SBR reactors (0.15 m diameter and 1.8 m height, R1 and R2) were used by feeding synthetic wastewater (diluted molasses, COD ranging from 1400... 

This paper studies and compares the effect of "Dutch disease" in Iranian economy in two periods of rising oil price (1973-1978) and (2004-2010). The study presents a DSGE model to analysis the behavior of economic variable in both periods and to address this question that whether or not policy maker has learning behavior. The model consists of households, final goods producers who divided in tradable goods and non-tradable goods sector and the government. I use calibration methods to estimate models parameters.Comparison of simulated results and the actual macroeconomic variables in Iran during 1338-1390 indicates that, first of all Dutch disease effect occur in both periods of oil shock so... 

This paper presents finite-element simulation results for hydraulic fracture’s initiation, propagation at reservoirs with damaged zone and naturally fractured reservoirs that likely finds in Iranian oil fields. To address this objective, a two-dimensional poro-elastic model was solved and cohesive zone modeling was used as the methodology for simulation fractures. This enables us to assign individual criteria for fracture initiation and propagation in each model. Our results demonstrate that hydraulic fracturing is not useful in reservoir with strongly damaged zone around the wellbore, because pore pressure increases at that zone and plastic flow of fracture wall happens, so it is better to... 

For application such as electrical contacts and spot welding electrodes, both high electrical conductivity and wear resistance are required. Additionally, such parts should have structural stability at evaluated temperature. Copper based composites containing carbides or oxides reinforcement can be the good choice for production of such parts. In present work, in-situ Cu/NbC composite via mechanical alloying with homogenous distribution of nano reinforcement particle has been produced. For this purpose, in first stage, copper powder was milled with 5, 8, 10 and 12 wt. % of niobium powder in two types of mills, i. e. vibratory dicky mill and planetary ball mill for 5 and 32 h respectively. At... 

One of the most important reasons of death in today’s world is the diseases related to cardiovascular system. Hypercholesterolemia is one of the most common forms of these diseases. There are a lot of experiments for diagnosing this disease, which are classified into two groups: invasive and noninvasive experiments. One of the well-known noninvasive experiments in this area is the photoplethysmography in which the changes of the photoplethysmography signal can reveal some valuable information about the cardiovascular system’s health.The objective of this study is to simulate the photoplethysmography experiment considering the clinical conditions of the experiment. In this work, the obtained...