Sharif Digital Repository

Biodegradation has always been as a proper method for treatment of oil contamination. Accordingly, several investigations have been done by mesophilic bacteria for biodegradation of hydrocarbons while few studies have been conducted about thermophilic bacteria.
There are many factors like high growth rate of thermophilic bacteria and good resistance of enzymes secreted from thermophiles against physical and chemical variations lead to the extensive use of thermophilic bacteria for removal of oil contamination. The important factors should be optimized in order to choose a suitable method for the removal of oil contaminations. Optimal conditions for oil contamination removal by... 

Nanocomposite films based on low density polyethylene (LDPE), containing of 2, 3, and 4 wt% organoclay (OC) and ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) copolymer as a new compatibilizer were prepared and characterized using X-ray diffraction, tensile tests, and oxygen permeation measurements. There was no exfoliation or intercalation of the clay layers in the absence of EVA, while an obvious increase in d-spacing was observed when the samples were prepared with EVA present. This issue was reflected in the properties of nanocomposites. The oxygen barrier properties of the OC/EVA/LDPE film were significantly better than those of the OC/LDPE film. The average aspect ratio of clay platelets in... 

This research relates to an improved method for making surfactant esters, especially sorbitan monostearate and tristearate. Sorbitan esters of fatty acid, stearate are derived from a reaction between sorbitan and fatty acid. Sorbitan fatty acid ester called sorbitan ester, are surfactants highly safe to use on human body and are widely used as a food additive in the production process as emulsifiers. Sorbitan esters are well known emulsifiers suitable for use in food, pharmaceutical products as well as many other applications. Despite its simple name, sorbitan ester is complex mixture of molecules. One such technique involves direct esterification of sorbitol or an intramolecular condensate... 

Viewpoints of various interest groups should be addressed in any public service appraisal. Urban public transportation development and services have diverse impacts on users, operators and the community. The impacts can be characterized by a wide range of perspectives including: efficiency, effectiveness, efficacy, economic, social and environmental dimensions. Deployment of quantitative techniques, such as multicriteria decision making methods, would facilitate such a multidimensional analysis and appraisal. The objective of the study summarized herein was to shed some light on the perceived attributes pertinent to the Tehran regular transit service appraisal. The major services include... 

In this study designing and manufacturing of high-temperature fluidized bed reactor were performed. These reactors are based on the contact of fluid with solid particles and balancing the weight of the solid materials. In the manufactured reactor, reduction of manganese de oxide to manganese oxide was done by carbon monoxide produced from incomplete combustion. The most important parameters in the reduction rate are: bed temperature and reduction gas concentration. Materials were injected into the reactor under the pressure of 1.13 mmHg and temperature of 787 ℃ in the bed depth of 4 cm for 2 hours and then the product was removed. XRD patterns showed that the dominant phase in the product... 

Nowadays anaerobic treatment of wastewater has been gaining more and more popularity. This process is usually used for waste sludge and wastewater with high concentrations of organic pollutants. One bioreactor that uses the anaerobic process to treat wastewater is the Anaerobic Baffled Reactor (ABR). This reactor was studied in the present study. The Anaerobic Baffled Reactor is composed of a series of up flow anaerobic sludge reactors. A simple design, low process cost, low sludge production and the lack of a need for a separator of the gas and sludge are some of the important characteristics of this reactor. Furthermore, ABRs are resistant against temperature and pH and can separate... 

The accurate assessment of biomarkers likes proteins, hormones or other biomolecules that amount of them changes with state of disease or level of treatment and gives diagnostic information is a difficult duty. In these samples, pathogens exist in small quantity compared to other background molecules. Therefore, appropriate sampling process for concentrating and separating pathogens from the matrix should be developed in order to provide rapid and accurate pathogen detection test. In this thesis design and fabrication of microfluidic biosensors based on the modified nanofibrous membranes were investigated and explained. PES nanofibrous membrane with carboxyl functional groups for covalent... 

Recent studies in nanotechnology field have shown this technology could solve many challenges and needs in oil and gas industry. As yet, many applications of nanoparticles in enhanced oil recovery have been reported. One of the most important applications is wettability alteration due to presence of nanoparticles in injecting fluid, which has recently been studied by several research groups. These studies indicate that, presence of nanoparticles in injecting water would improve oil recovery. However, there is no adequate information about the mechanisms affecting fluid flow in reservoir rock and its mathematical modeling.The aim of this project is to evaluate the effect of injection of... 

The removal of glyphosate, one of the most widely used herbicide, with membrane bioreactor (MBR) was studied. Beside of glyphosate, the synthetic wastewater contained molasses and other salts as nutrient source. The membrane was made from polypropylene and was immersed in the bioreactor. The COD of the feed was adjusted by varying the ratio of glyphosate to molasses. The total COD was 500, 750 and 1000 mg/L. The resulted showed that when the bioreactor coupled with membrane the removal efficiency increased. The increase was attributed to higher concentration of biomass or MLSS in the MBR. The average of MLSS in the MBR was 8500 mg/L while in bioreactor without cell recycling and in batch... 

for decades Cancer has been one of the major causes of death universally. Though extensive efforts in developing new anticancer therapies, they face failures in clinical trials and curing the sick owing to time consuming and expensive preclinical models with poor predictions of drug responses in human. To address this challenge it is crucial to develop preclinical models mimicking the main aspects of a tumor that can provide effective prediction of therapeutic responses. Tumor on chip technology has appeared as a promising approach for providing effective cancer models and reliable preclinical predictions. In this project, collagen was first extracted as the main constituent of the tumor... 

In this paper, the general research of impedance control is addressed for a robotic manipulator with a moving flexible base. Impedance control imposes a relation between force and displacement at the contact point with the environment. The concept of impedance control of flexible base moving manipulators (FBMM) is rather new and is being considered. The dynamic of manipulator is decomposed into slow and fast dynamics using singular perturbation method. New sliding mode impedance control method (SMIC), using an element on the end effector is proposed for high precision impedance control of FBMM. The sliding mode impedance control method as a robust impedance control law is derived for the... 

The main objective of this project is to investigate modeling for a robotic swarm with suitable sensors and to analyze effect of sensory noise on the control and unity of the swarm. This project is an extension of analytical study done by S. Etemadi, A. Alasty and G. Vossoughi in Sharif University of technology. The flocking frame assumed to have a leader robot that controls over all behavior of the swarm made of agents’ robots with limited equipments and low intelligence that only obey some basic attraction and repulsion laws that will be explained. As an initial step of the analysis, we investigate proper physical model, sensors and navigation systems suitable to the model. Next, the... 

Modeling and Control are fundamental issues for fish robots, which can play basic roles in design, optimization, fabrication, and eventually utilization of them. A review on the literature reveals the shortage of an analytical closed form model with little simplifications and high precision, and also control works based on such models. Studying LAEBT theory, it is shown that this theory is suitable for determining the forces produced due to the tail movements considered in the present work, and then it is used to determine the forces. Experimental investigations by means of the setup made for this purpose showed that the obtained equations for the forces have got acceptable precision.... 

Temperature noise phenomenon in nuclear reactors results to the vital information about the system. This phenomenon may originate from coolant inlet temperature fluctuations, coolant fluid velocity fluctuations or the reactor power fluctuations in PWR reactors. Diagnosis of such temperature noise sources shall improve the reactor control and protection.The present research aims to develop a software to model the temperature noise in the axial direction of a single channel comprises of fuel rod and the associated coolant to recognize the type of temperature noise sources. In this regard, research stages are as follows: first the temperature noise caused by three conventional noise sources in... 

The Very-High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) design is one of the six candidates for the Generation IV nuclear reactors. The reactor core type of the VHTR design is either prismatic or pebble-bed. In pebble bed reactors, the core is filled of thousands of graphite and fuel pebbles. Fuel pebbles in these reactors consist of TRISO particles, which are embedded in a graphite matrix stochastically. The reactor core is also stochastically filled up of fuel and dummy pebbles with an unequal ratio. These two stochastic geometries are the so-called double heterogeneous of this type of reactors. In the current study, a... 

This research focuses on the robust mobile robot localization exploiting motion information acquired from an optical mouse operating based on optical flow technology. Most techniques of visual motion measurement are based on the well research discipline called “optical flow”. Theoretically, optical flow as a method of localization can be highly accurate, but it is sensitive to the noise and surface texture/optical characteristics and distance variations between the CCD detector and surface. As one could not achieve acceptable results in practical situations, to handle these problems, we propose to attach an acceleration – gyro (INS) sensor on the CCD detector (optical mouse) to improve the... 

Noise phenomena, which is considered as a nuisance factor, always acts as a barrier to achieve optimal performance in all systems. In Nuclear power reactors, noise can occur due to mechanical problems such as fluctuation in control rods, failure in placing Fuel assembly in their locations properly or other factors such as creation of small bubbles in moderator. Regardless of its cause, noise leaves its impact on cross section area of material within the reactor core. Change in material cross section area shows its effect in neutron flux. Although noise is a small disturbance and may not have much impact on the reactor momentarily performance itself, in case of continuity, it can leave... 

Robot navigation and guidance is an important issue in robotic. Navigation by itself includes localization, path planning and guidance. For having a successful navigation it is necessary to succeed in all of those parts. The localization precision as basic part of localization is important and having more accurate information of robot position is important. Recently, sensors which use optical flow technic and are widely used in optical mouses are so common and they are able to measure displacement with resolution of 3 to 63 micron. In this research, a localization method for micro robot localization based on optical flow and INS sensor data fusion is presented.
Two data fusion method... 

The present study deals with designing controller for Therapeutic Exercise Robots which belongs to larger group namely Rehabilitation robots. Therapeutic exercise robots are often realized in shape of exoskeleton robots. The main line of present research is involved with, designing controller for lower limb therapeutic exercise robots and offering and implementing technical rehabilitation ideas. Firstly, in order to have a reliable position-control, considering practical limitations (e.g. system uncertainties), a robust adaptive control has been designed. Adaptive control can deals with parameters uncertainties and covering unstructured uncertainties (e.g. disturbance and noise) can be...