Sharif Digital Repository

Background: Small scale robotics have attracted growing attention for the prospect of targeting and accessing cell-sized sites, necessary for high precision biomedical applications and drug/gene delivery. The loss of controlled gene therapy, inducing systemic side effects and reduced therapeutic efficiency, can be settled utilizing these intelligent carriers. Methods: Newly proposed solutions for the main challenges of control, power supplying, gene release and final carrier extraction/degradation have shifted these smart miniature robots to the point of being employed for practical applications of transferring oligonucleotides (pDNA, siRNA, mRNA, etc.) in near future. Conclusion: In this... 

We consider magnetic actuation and control of a spherical neutrally buoyant magnetic microrobot via magnetic coil setups and seek to design an optimal controller to reduce the required energy and coils’ currents. We showed that in currently employed setups, where the actuation frequency is few tens of Hertz, the nonlinear dynamics of the system can be well approximated by a set of linear constrained ones. The approximated model is obtained by consciously overlooking the rotational dynamics and the inertia terms in translational dynamics. We acquired the linear quadratic regulation (LQR) controller for the approximated model which is a constrained time-varying system. Finally, 3D manipulation... 

A number of HZSM-5 catalysts modified with 5 wt% Mg, Na, Zr, and Al as well as others modified with 5-60 wt% Zn prepared by wet impregnation. These materials were characterized by the NH3-TPD, XRF, and XRD analyses and tested in a slurry reactor to determine their activities in dehydration of methanol solution in kerosene. Reactions were carried out at 230°C and 19 bar for 4 h of residence time in the reactor. Results showed that in the first series, the catalyst modified with Zr and in the second series, the one modified with 10 wt% Zn led to the highest methanol conversion. It was deduced that elimination of strong acid sites and partial replacement of active cations in the HZSM-5 zeolite... 

In this paper we analyses the energy consumption of well known family of asynchronous circuits and present a new methodology for energy estimation of these circuits at intermediate-level of abstraction. Energy estimation is performed by simulating the intermediate format of the design. The number of Read and Write accesses on the ports of the concurrent processes are counted by analyzing the conditional and computational portion during the simulation which is the base of our estimation methodology. Our proposed power estimation scheme is faster than usual post-synthesis power estimation by an order of 9, while the estimated power resides in a boundary of 11% total imprecision. © 2007 IEEE  

NoC is an efficient on-chip communication architecture for SoC architectures. It enables integration of a large number of computational and storage blocks on a single chip. NoCs have tackled the SoCs disadvantages and are scalable. In this paper, we compare two popular NoC topologies, i.e., mesh and torus, in terms of different figures of merit e.g., latency, power consumption, and power/throughput ratio under different routing algorithms and two common traffic models, uniform and hotspot. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in comparing mesh and torus topologies under different routing algorithms and traffic models with respect to their performance and power consumption.... 

Resection of the epilepsy foci is the best treatment for more than 15% of epileptic patients or 50% of patients who are refractory to all forms of medical treatment. Accurate mapping of the locations of epileptic neuronal networks can result in the complete resection of epileptic foci. Even though currently electroencephalography is the best technique for mapping the epileptic focus, it cannot define the boundary of epilepsy that accurately. Herein we put forward a new accurate brain mapping technique using superparamagnetic nanoparticles (SPMNs). The main hypothesis in this new approach is the creation of super-paramagnetic aggregates in the epileptic foci due to high electrical and... 

This paper scrutinizes the magnetic field effect to deliver the superparamagnetic nanoparticles (SPMNs) through the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB). Herein we study the interaction between the nanoparticle (NP) and BBB membrane using Molecular Dynamic (MD) techniques. The MD model is used to enhance our understanding of the dynamic behavior of SPMNs crossing the endothelial cells in the presence of a gradient magnetic field. Actuation of NPs under weak magnetic field offers the great advantage of a non-invasive drug delivery without the risk of causing injury to the brain. Furthermore, a weak magnetic portable stimulator can be developed using low complexity prototyping techniques. Based on MD... 

Nowadays, nanoparticles (NPs) are used in a variety of biomedical applications including brain disease diagnostics and subsequent treatments. Among the various types of NPs, magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) have been implemented by many research groups for an array of life science applications. In this paper, we studied MNPs controlled delivery into the endothelial cells using a magnetic field. Dynamics equations of MNPs were defined in the continuous domain using control theory methods and were applied to crossing the cell membrane. This study, dedicated to clinical and biomedical research applications, offers a guideline for the generation of a magnetic field required for the delivery of... 

Multigeneration systems (MGSs) driven by renewable sources are proved as cutting-edge technologies for multiple productions purposes to curb greenhouse gas emissions. With this regard, a novel geothermal-based MGS is proposed to produce multiple commodities of cooling, heating, power, and hydrogen, simultaneously, using liquefied natural gas (LNG) as cold energy recovery. The system is composed of an organic Rankine cycle (ORC), an ejector refrigeration cycle (ERC), an LNG power generation system, and a proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer system. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed MGS, energy, exergy, and exergoeconomic analysis are employed as the most effective tools... 

Asynchronous circuits have many advantages vs synchronous design styles like high performance and lower power consumption; however, there is a drawback of big overhead in handshake circuitry of these circuits. In this paper, we have reduced the amount of these extra circuits by take advantage of some compiler techniques. The compiler methods can be used innovatively to improve the synthesis results in terms of both power consumption and area, since these code motions lead to removing of completion detection and validity check parts of asynchronous designs. To the best of our knowledge this is the first effort in using the compiler pre-synthesis optimizations in asynchronous circuits to... 

A 37 dBm power amplifier (PA) is designed on a 0.25 μm optical T-gate pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (pHEMT) technology. The design of this two-stage PA along with a step-by-step design procedure is presented in this paper. This methodology can be used for design of PA in different technologies and frequencies. The PA delivers 5 W output power over the frequency band of 13-19 GHz. It shows average power-added efficiency of 37% and large signal gain of 15 dB in measurements which is consistent with simulation results. The output power and efficiency of the realised amplifier reach maximums of 37.6 dBm and 45%, respectively. Considering output power, bandwidth, chip area and... 

Quartz is usually detected as an impurity of kaolinite clays. The present work attempts to evaluate the role and behaviour of quartz particles in geopolymerisation and its probable effects on mechanical behaviour of geopolymeric products. Two kaolinite clays with different free quartz contents were used as raw materials to produce geopolymers. Results showed that using high content quartz kaolin causes higher compressive strength. Scanning electron microscopy studies confirmed that quartz does not participate in geopolymerisation and completely remains in the structure as fine particles. High hardness quartz particles by retarding crack growth in the geopolymer matrix enhance mechanical... 

MapReduce and its open source implementation, Hadoop, have gained widespread adoption for parallel processing of big data jobs. Since the number of such big data jobs is also rapidly rising, reducing their energy consumption is increasingly more important to reduce environmental impact as well as operational costs. Prior work by Mashayekhy et al. (IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. 26, 2720–2733, 2016), has tackled the problem of energy-aware scheduling of a single MapReduce job but we provide a far more efficient heuristic in this paper. We first model the problem as an Integer Linear Program to find the optimal solution using ILP solvers. Then we present a task-based greedy scheduling... 

This paper provides empirical evidence on a novel complementarity between VAT and trade taxes. Downstream domestic firms require VAT receipts from importers to claim VAT on purchases, increasing incentives for honest reporting of imports. Trade gap, the difference between mirror and domestic trade reports in Iran at 6-digit HS disaggregation, is used to measure this complementarity. Iran introduced VAT in 2008 and, since then, has increased its rate from 3 to 9 percent. Difference-in-differences estimates show that a 1 percentage point increase in the VAT rate reduces the trade gap by about 2 percent. Consistent with the compliance mechanisms for VAT, a smaller effect for consumer products...