Sharif Digital Repository

Many Middle-East countries, like Iran, have dynamic banking industries and have observed merger and acquisitions (M&A) waves. M&A waves are usually defined in the developed world context and some of their main drivers were identified as: market timing, environment's shocks, merger manias, government regulation and regulatory, and technological changes. It has been discussed that merger waves and their reasons are among the ten most important unsolved mysteries in the field of finance (Brealey and Myers, 1991, p. 923), and as a result of this, it was not possible to completely clarify the reasons behind emerging M&A waves, especially in developing countries; for this reason in these... 

This chapter aims at pointing out that how mergers and acquisitions (M&As) as popular strategies which they are based on external growth approach have affected the performance of banks and entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in the context of Iranian financial sector. In this regard, it has been tried to investigate in what way EO moderates the relationships between the performance of banks in one hand, and M&As on the other hand. For this goal, 114 participants including the top and middle managers of the Iranian banks were chosen to be closely considered. The research is an applied research and a cross-correlation methodology has been used to spotlight on the probable relationships between EO... 

Hand in hand with the flourish of the biodiesel industry, glycerol (GLY) as an inconvenient by-product has generated environmental and sustainability concerns. Devising measures for efficient transformation of GLY into value-added products is a promising solution. In this contribution, the transformation of GLY to lactic acid (LA) as a valuable chemical was investigated in a continuous process for industrial applications. In this regard, a catalytic method using heterogeneous Cu nanoparticles in NaOH solution was studied in a microreactor by a CFD simulation. A seven-inlet micromixer comprising an optimized mixing unit was incorporated for uniform distribution of the species. The effects of... 

Periodic cycles of flood and drought are aggravated by global warming, thereby inducing critical desiccation cracks in soils. However, the estimation and prevention of crack propagation is imperfect due to the imprecise field measurements and the underlying soil uncertainties. To address these issues, this study presents an alternative framework to assess the probability of crack propagation. Thus, a series of Monte Carlo sampling (MCS) and Gaussian random fields are employed to quantify the associated uncertainties. The results suggest that matric suction has a governing effect in the course of crack propagation and induces cracking particularly at shallow depths. Crack propagation tends to... 

This work studies the nonlinear oscillations of an elastic rotating shaft with acceleration to pass through the critical speeds. A mathematical model incorporating the Von-Karman higher-order deformations in bending is developed to investigate the nonlinear dynamics of rotors. A flexible shaft on flexible bearings with springs and dampers is considered as rotor system for this work. The shaft is modeled as a beam and the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory is applied. The kinetic and strain energies of the rotor system are derived and Lagrange method is then applied to obtain the coupled nonlinear differential equations of motion for 6 degrees of freedom. In order to solve these equations... 

This work studies the nonlinear oscillations of an elastic rotating shaft with acceleration to pass through the critical speeds. A mathematical model incorporating the Von-Karman higher-order deformations in bending is developed and analyzed to investigate the nonlinear dynamics of rotors. A flexible shaft on flexible bearings with springs and dampers is considered as rotor system for the present work. The shaft is modeled as a beam with a circular cross-section and the Euler Bernoulli beam theory is applied. The kinetic and strain energies of the rotor system are derived and Lagrange method is then applied to obtain the coupled nonlinear differential equations of motion for 6° of freedom.... 

In this paper, we consider a special version of the well-known line-simplification problem for simplifying the boundary of a region illuminated by a point light source q, or its visibility polygon VP(q). In this simplification approach, we should take the position of q as an essential factor into account to determine the quality of the resulting simplification. For this purpose, we redefine the known distance- and area-distortion error criteria as the main simplification criteria to take into account the distance between the observer q and the boundary of VP(q). Based on this, we propose algorithms for simplifying VP(q). More precisely, we propose simplification algorithms of O(n2) and... 

Obtaining a reliable reservoir permeability map that is consistent with all available data is of great important for reservoir engineers. However, there is not enough core from existing wells to estimate the reservoir permeability directly but Well log data are more widely available. This study aims to model permeability within the reservoir while there is no enough data. In particular, we use artificial neural networks to estimate permeability using four input logs of sonic, gravity, porosity and neutron logs in six existing wells. In order to eliminate the correlated data, we have done Principal Component Analysis on selected input logs. Collocated cokriging is considered as a valuable... 

In this paper, we propose a method for maintaining the region visible from a moving point observer inside a planar scene. In this method, we check the observer position in discrete time-stamps to detect and apply changes to the visible or illuminated region of a moving point observer q, or VP(q). We efficiently maintain a list C(q) of edges in VP(q) which are subject to change during the motion. In each time-stamp that VP(q) is to be updated, we only refine and redraw the view against the edges of C(q) that indicate the positions of the visibility changes. We build an enriched representation of the visibility graph in a preprocessing step to apply the required updates on C(q) efficiently and... 

A new Zinc phosphating bath, which produces coatings at relatively lower temperatures within a reasonable time by using of chemical accelerators has been devised. Improvement of the bath performance by the addition of divalent cations like calcium, nickel has been studied. Bath formulation and operating conditions have been optimized by coating weight determinations. Stable samples of phosphating formulations with and without calcium and nickel salts were prepared and the structure and morphology of the phosphate coatings were determined by using X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques, scanning electron microscopy. ASTMB117 salt spray test and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) were...