Sharif Digital Repository

Atomic emission detection (AED) is a sensitive as well as a selective detection technique for gas chromatography (GC) and provides element-specific information. A rapidly increasing number of applications in many different areas illustrates the versatility and analytical power of the technique - especially when complex samples have to be analysed. The complementary use of GC-AED and GC with mass-spectrometric detection often yields the most rewarding results. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved  

In solution of the Euler equations in the steady state external flows, error or residual waves are blamed for decelerating the convergence. These waves may be damped by adding a bulk viscosity term to the momentum equations. We analyse effects of this term on the linearized differential equations, and study its explicit and implicit implementation in one and two space dimensions. Optimum values of the bulk viscosity damping (BVD) are discussed. After generalization to two space dimensions, its performance both alone and in combination with a soft wall boundary condition and residual smoothing in central differencing codes is reviewed. It is shown that BVD is complementary to them, and acts... 

Diffuse reflectance near-infrared (NIR) data (908–1676 nm) of chicken breast fillets was recorded in a non-destructive way using a portable miniaturised NIR spectrometer. The NIR data was used to discriminate between fresh and thawed breast fillets and to determine the birds’ growth conditions. NIR data was recorded of 153 commercial supermarket chicken fillet samples by applying the NIR device equipped with the standard issue collar on the samples in three different ways: (i) directly on the meat (ii) through the top foil of the package (i.e. with an air pocket between the foil and the breast fillet), and (iii) through the top foil with the packaging turned bottom up (i.e. no air pocket... 

Hough transform based object detectors divide an object into a number of patches and combine them using a shape model. For efficient combination of patches into the shape model, the individual patches are assumed to be independent of one another. Although this independence assumption is key for fast inference, it requires the individual patches to have a high discriminative power in predicting the class and location of objects. In this paper, we argue that the sparsity of the appearance of a patch in its neighborhood can be a very powerful measure to increase the discriminative power of a local patch and incorporate it as a sparsity potential for object detection. Further, we show that this... 

We study the Kitaev-Ising model, where ferromagnetic Ising interactions are added to the Kitaev model on a lattice. This model has two phases which are characterized by topological and ferromagnetic order. Transitions between these two kinds of order are then studied on a quasi-one-dimensional system, on a ladder, and on a two-dimensional periodic lattice, a torus. By exactly mapping the quasi-one-dimensional case to an anisotropic XY chain we show that the transition occurs at zero λ, where λ is the strength of the ferromagnetic coupling. In the two-dimensional case the model is mapped to a two-dimensional Ising model in transverse field, where it shows a transition at a finite value of λ.... 

An accurate thermal model to predict the heat generation in rechargeable batteries is an essential tool for advanced thermal management in high power applications, such as electric vehicles. For such applications, the battery materials' details and cell design are normally not provided. In this work a simple, though accurate, thermal model for batteries has been developed, considering the temperature- and current-dependent overpotential heat generation and State-of-Charge dependent entropy contributions. High power rechargeable Li-ion (7.5 Ah) batteries have been experimentally investigated and the results are used for model verification. It is shown that the State-of-Charge dependent... 

This article provides an agent-based model of a hypothetical standalone electricity network to identify how the feed-in tariffs and the installed capacity of wind power, calculated in percentage of total system demand, affect the electricity consumption from renewables. It includes the mechanism of electricity pricing on the Day Ahead Market (DAM) and the Imbalance Market (IM). The extra production volumes of Electricity from Renewable Energy Sources (RES-E) and the flexibility of electrical consumption of industries is provided as reserves on the IM. Five thousand simulations were run by using the agent-based model to gather data that were then fit in linear regression models. This helped... 

Aperiodic perforated graphene layers were synthesized and used in fabrication of optical nanocavity absorbers. Chemical vapor deposition-grown graphene (Gr) layers were exposed to oxygen plasma etching to obtain the perforated graphene (pGr). The fabricated pGr/SiO2 (68 nm)/Ag (150 nm) nanocavity could present significant higher optical absorption, especially at around 530 nm wavelength region, as compared to a benchmark Gr/SiO2 (68 nm)/Ag (150 nm) sample. The effect of pore size of the pGr layer on the absorption property of the nanocavity has been studied by both experimental and numerical methods. The dependence of the absorption property of the nanocavity on the incident angles of... 

We present a technology for the manufacturing of silicon- filled integrated waveguides enabling the realization of lowloss high-performance millimeter-wave passive components and high gain array antennas, thus facilitating the realization of highly integrated millimeter-wave systems. The proposed technology employs deep reactive-ion-etching (DRIE) techniques with aluminum metallization steps to integrate rectangular waveguides with high geometrical accuracy and continuousmetallic side walls. Measurement results of integrated rectangular waveguides are reported exhibiting losses of 0.15 dB/ at 105GHz.Moreover, ultra-wideband coplanar to waveguide transitions with 0.6 dB insertion loss at 105... 

Spiro thio-oxindoles are prepared in situ by the reaction of the corresponding aldehydes and thio-oxindoles in a straightforward, environmentally friendly, highly efficient and simple procedure. The reaction took place in water with no catalyst added. This one-pot reaction afforded regio- and diastereoselective products in high yields (61-93%)  

Vibration control is an essential problem in different structure. Smart material can make a structure smart, adaptive and self-controlling so they are effective in active vibration control. Piezoelectric elements can be used as sensors and actuators in flexible structures for sensing and actuating purposes. In this paper we use PZT elements as sensors and actuator to control the vibration of a cantilever beam. Also we study the effect of different types of controller on vibration. © 2009 IEEE  

In this article, the novel concept of using magnetic nanofluidic electrolyte for redox flow batteries is demonstrated for the first time. In this regard, the stable magnetic nanofluidic electrolytes are prepared by dispersing magnetic modified multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MMWCNTs) in the positive electrolyte of a polysulfide-iodide redox flow battery at mass concentrations of less than 0.3 g L−1. The electrochemical behavior of magnetic nanofluidic electrolyte was examined using cyclic voltammetry at different mass concentrations of MMWCNTs with a carbon felt electrode. Higher and stable peak current densities were observed at larger mass concentrations of MMWCNTs. A polysulfide-iodide... 

We investigate the reconstruction of 3D human-object interactions from images, encompassing 3D human shape and pose estimation as well as object shape and pose estimation. To address this task, we introduce an autoregressive transformer-based variational autoencoder capable of learning a robust shape prior from extensive 3D shape datasets. Additionally, we leverage the reconstructed 3D human body as supplementary features for object shape and pose estimation. In contrast, prior methods only predict object pose and rely on shape templates for shape prediction. Experimental findings on the BEHAVE dataset underscore the effectiveness of our proposed approach, achieving a 40.7cm Chamfer distance... 

Histidine rich protein II derived peptide (HRP II 169-182) was investigated by molecular dynamics, MD, simulation and 17O electric field gradient, EFG, tensor calculations. MD simulation was performed in water at 300 K with α-helix initial structure. It was found that peptide loses its initial α-helix structure rapidly and is converted to random coil and bent secondary structures. To understand how peptide structure affects EFG tensors, initial structure and final conformations resulting from MD simulations were used to calculate 17O EFG tensors of backbone carbonyl oxygens. Calculations were performed using B3LYP method and 6-31 + G* basis set. Calculated 17O EFG tensors were used to... 

Decision-making is challenging for agents operating in partially observable environments. In such environments, agents’ observation is often based on incomplete, ambiguous, and noisy sensed data, which may lead to perceptual aliasing. This means there might be distinctive states of the environment that appear the same to the agents, and agents fail to take suitable actions. Currently, machine learning, collaboration, and practical reasoning techniques are used to improve agents’ observation and their performance in such environments. However, their long exploration and negotiation periods make them incapable of reacting in real time and making decisions on the fly. The Ontology-based... 

We present an experimental investigation of stochastic switching of a bistable Josephson junction array resonator with a resonance frequency in the GHz range. As the device is in the regime where the anharmonicity is on the order of the linewidth, the bistability appears for a pump strength of only a few photons. We measure the dynamics of the bistability by continuously observing the jumps between the two metastable states, which occur with a rate ranging from a few Hz down to a few mHz. The switching rate strongly depends on the pump strength, readout strength and the temperature, following Kramers' theory. The interplay between nonlinearity and coupling, in this little explored regime,... 

By combining portable, handheld near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy with state-of-the-art classification algorithms, we developed a powerful method to test chicken meat authenticity. The research presented shows that it is both possible to discriminate fresh from thawed meat, based on NIR spectra, as well as to correctly classify chicken fillets according to the growth conditions of the chickens with good accuracy. In all cases, the random subspace discriminant ensemble (RSDE) method significantly outperformed other common classification methods such as partial least squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) with classification... 

Benzopyrans, or chromenes, are widespread in nature and are considered to be a privileged scaffold in medicinal chemistry. Herein, we report the first organocatalyzed asymmetric synthesis of chiral benzopyrans. The benzopyran unit is constructed through a domino reaction involving an oxa-Michael attack of salicylic aldehyde derivatives onto α,β-unsaturated aldehydes, activated through iminium-ion formation with the organocatalyst, followed by an intramolecular aldol reaction and subsequent elimination of water. This overall reaction sequence provides benzopyrans with aromatic C-2 substituents in up to 60% yield and 60% enantioselectivity, while C-2 aliphatic analogues can be obtained in 90%... 

Self-sufficient power sources provide a promising application of abundant electronic devices utilized in detection of ambient properties. Recently, triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have been widely investigated to broaden the self-powered systems by converting the ambient mechanical agitations into electrical voltage and current. Graphene oxide (GO), not only for sensing applications but also as a brilliant energy-related nanomaterial, provides a wide range of controllable bandgap energies, as well as facile synthesis route. In this study, GO-based self-powered photodetectors have been fabricated by conflating the photosensitivity and triboelectric characteristics of freestanding GO... 

The petroleum industry suffers from reservoir souring phenomena, which has negative impacts on production facilities, health, and environment. Injection of incompatible water into the reservoir (waterflooding), which is considered as an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method, is one of the most common causes of reservoir souring. In general, injected brine, especially seawater, contains high amounts of sulfate ion (SO42−). A high concentration of sulfate in the presence of sulfate-reducing bacteria (SRB) leads to the microbial reservoir souring. During this phenomenon, sulfide, specifically hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S) appears in the producing fluid of the reservoir. In this paper, a coupled...