Sharif Digital Repository

For any respiratory sound analysis or assessment, respiratory flow must also be measured simultaneously with the sounds. However, due to difficulties and/or inaccuracy of the most flow measurement techniques, several researchers have attempted to estimate flow from respiratory sounds. However, all of the proposed methods heavily depend on the availability of different rates of flow for calibration of the model, which makes their use limited by a large degree. In this paper, a robust and novel method for estimating flow using entropy of the band pass filtered tracheal sounds is proposed. The proposed method is independent of the flow rate chosen for calibration; it requires only one breath... 

For any respiratory sound analysis or assessment, respiratory flow must also be measured simultaneously with the sounds. However, due to difficulties and/or inaccuracy of the most flow measurement techniques, several researchers have attempted to estimate flow from respiratory sounds. However, all of the proposed methods heavily depend on the availability of different rates of flow for calibration of the model, which makes their use limited by a large degree. In this paper, a robust and novel method for estimating flow using entropy of the band pass filtered tracheal sounds is proposed. The proposed method is independent of the flow rate chosen for calibration; it requires only one breath... 

Relationship between respiratory sounds and flow has always been of interest for researchers and physicians. However, the flow-sound relationship at very low flow rate has been questionable because breath sounds must exceed a minimum flow in order to be audible and different from the background noise. This study aimed to find the minimum critical flow rates for respiratory sounds to be audible and different from background noise. Tracheal and lung sound signals of healthy subjects in two groups of adults (12 subjects) and children (9 subjects) were studied. The values of minimum critical flow were determined comparing the spectrogram of the respiratory sounds at very low flow with that of... 

This paper presents a single-phase Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) inverter for photovoltaic applications. The proposed control strategy permits the optimum control of each string of PV panels in different insolation conditions. Based on the presented mathematical analysis, an analytic constraint is derived to check the stable operation of the inverter. A modified MPPT control strategy is also proposed based on this new condition. This strategy enhances the stability margins of the system by changing the operating point of some PV arrays. In this approach, the extracted power from high power cell is reduced to prevent instability issue and to avoid injection of highly distorted current into the... 

Recently, there has been renewed interest in semantic word representation also called word embedding, in a wide variety of natural language processing tasks requiring sophisticated semantic and syntactic information. The quality of word embedding methods is usually evaluated based on English language benchmarks. Nevertheless, only a few studies analyze word embedding for low resource languages such as Persian. In this paper, we perform such an extensive word embedding evaluation in Persian language based on a set of lexical semantics tasks named analogy, concept categorization, and word semantic relatedness. For these evaluation tasks, we provide three benchmark data sets to show the... 

During recording lung sounds over the chest, heart sounds (HS) are also recorded and interferes with the inteipretation of lung sounds especially at low frequencies. Hence, several methods have been proposed to remove or reduce HS from lung sounds. The first step in most of the methods developed for HS reduction is to localize the segments of lung sounds including HS. In this study a method based on multi-resolution product of lung sounds wavelet coefficients was implemented for HS localization and its performance was compared to that of three methods developed for HS localization. The methods were tested on data from 6 healthy subjects recorded at low (7.5ml/s/kg) and medium (15ml/s/kg)... 

A novel intelligent semi-active control system for an eleven degrees of freedom passenger car's suspension system using magnetorheological (MR) damper with neuro-fuzzy (NF) control strategy to enhance desired suspension performance is proposed. In comparison with earlier studies, an improvement in problem modeling is made. The proposed method consists of two parts: a fuzzy control strategy to establish an efficient controller to improve ride comfort and road handling (RCH) and an inverse mapping model to estimate the force needed for a semi-active damper. The fuzzy logic rules are extracted based on Sugeno inference engine. The inverse mapping model is based on an artificial neural network... 

Using CNG as an additive for gasoline is a proper choice due to higher octane number of CNG enriched gasoline with respect to that of gasoline. As a result, it is possible to use gasoline with lower octane number in the engine. This would also mean the increase of compression ratio in SI engines resulting in higher performance and lower gasoline consumption. Over the years, the use of simulation codes to model the thermodynamic cycle of an internal combustion engine have developed tools for more efficient engine designs and fuel combustion. In this study, a thermodynamic cycle simulation of a conventional four-stroke spark-ignition engine has been developed. The model is used to study the... 

With the declining energy resources and increase of pollutant emissions, a great deal of efforts has been focused on the development of alternatives for fossil fuels. One of the promising alternative fuels to gasoline in the internal combustion engine is natural gas [1-5]. The application of natural gas in current internal combustion engines is realistic due to its many benefits. The higher thermal efficiency due to the higher octane value and lower exhaust emissions including CO2 as a result of the lower carbon to hydrogen ratio of the fuel are the two important feature of using CNG as an alternative fuel. It is well known that computer simulation codes are valuable economically as a cost... 

Gaining insight into possible vibratory responses of dynamical systems around their stable equilibria is an essential step, which must be taken before their design and application. The results of such a study can significantly help prevent instability in closed-loop stabilized systems by avoiding the excitation of the system in the neighborhood of its resonance. This paper investigates nonlinear oscillations of a rotary inverted pendulum (RIP) with a full-state feedback controller. Lagrange’s equations are employed to derive an accurate 2-DoF mathematical model, whose parameter values are extracted by both the measurement and 3D modeling of the real system components. Although the governing... 

A suction-controlled ring device has been developed to continuously measure the coefficient of lateral soil pressure in deformable unsaturated soil samples from the at-rest to the active condition under application of increasing vertical pressure and controlled matric suction. The device incorporates a thin aluminum specimen ring equipped with horizontal strain gages for recording the lateral soil strains. In addition, a sensor recording water volume changes is utilized to continuously monitor the degree of saturation of the soil sample during tests. The matric suction within the soil texture is controlled using the axis translation technique. In order to verify the performance of the ring... 

We introduce a new smooth, non-toxic, biocompatible method for cross-linking of gum tragacanth (GT), a polysaccharide of natural origin, in order to serve as a new supporting matrix for immobilization systems. The modified gum is used as a matrix for the catalysis of the conversion of benzyl penicillin to 6-aminopenicillanic acid (6-APA) by means of Escherichia coli ATCC11105 with penicillin G acylase (PGA) activity. The results show that GT beads can not only serve as a proper matrix for immobilization, but show enhanced hydrolysis rate and stability compared to other immobilization systems used for this reaction. This signifies the potential of GT as a biocompatible matrix for... 

The Class-E power amplifier has been widely studied and formulated in the literature. Although the majority of reported inductive coupling wireless power transfer (WPT) systems use a class-E power amplifier for driving the primary coil, still there is a lack of a comprehensive study on class-E circuit dedicated to WPT, providing a set of closed form design equations for proper class-E operation. This paper presents the required design equations needed to design a 'true' class-E circuit for WPT applications. Equations for the series-tuned secondary coil WPT system are presented, as well as two different design procedures for the parallel-tuned secondary coil. The derived equations have been... 

Pole Side Impact Tes is one out of three crash tests described by Euro NCAP standard for star rating of a vehicle and is required for assessing the Adult Occupant Protection. In this paper the goal is to determine the crashworthiness of side doors and B pillar in a Pole Side Impact Test based on Euro New Car Assessment Program (Euro-NCAP) using computer and simulation method. In this matter, a vehicle model has been prepared and meshed using Hypermesh and CATIA. The velocity of 29 km/h has been assigned to the vehicle which was on top of a cart while the pole has been assigned as a rigid static object based on Euro NCAP requirements specifically. Results show that different amounts of energy... 

To assess a car under the Euro New Car Assessment Program (Euro-NCAP), Adult Occupant Protection is one out of three parameters which need to be calculated with a weight factor of 50% while the other parameters, Child Occupant Protection and Pedestrian Occupant Protection, have a weight factor of 20%. The Pole Side Impact Test, beside two other tests, Side and Front Impact, is also required to calculate the Adult Occupant Protection. It shows how important the Pole Side Impact Test is and what an effective role it has in the car rating assessment. In this paper, the objective is to evaluate the effect of thickness on the energy absorbed by the side doors and the B pillar and its... 

In Euro NCAP standard, adult protection is one of the most important rating scores with 50% weight factor while child protection and pedestrian protection are accounted into consideration with 20% weight factor. For adult protection testing, three tests are required to perform: (1) side impact, (2) pole impact, (3) front impact. In the side impact test, dummy's head, chest, shoulder, thorax, ribs, abdomen, pelvic and femur must be studied to evaluate the rating score. Crashworthiness of a car during side impact can describe the score rated for that car. In this paper the goal is to determine the crashworthiness of side doors and B-pillar in side impact crash est by simulation using LS DYNA... 

In side impact test which is one out of three tests of Euro NCAP standard, front and rear doors and B pillar are most absorbance parts among vehicle body parts. Passengers are highly in danger while side crash, because of the distance between passenger's head and vehicle body. In this paper effect of material and thickness of doors and B-pillar and their absorbed energy during crash and improvement of its crashworthiness with respect to light weight design are studied using LS DYNA solver. The objective of this paper is to propose a material for doors and B-pillar with a specified thickness to achieve maximum absorbed energy and minimum weight. The shape of the doors and B-pillar remains...