Sharif Digital Repository

Viability and proliferation of cells in cell culture mainly depends on i) cell culture medium, ii) cell-cell interaction, and iii) the supporting scaffold. Among these factors, and within recent years, surface and mechanical properties of the supporting ECM has attracted many researchers. Experiment results show that the animal cell adhesion is accelerated on stiffer scaffolds. Electrical charge of the scaffold is also a determinant term in the kinetics of adhesion and on a relatively charged scaffold, one can expect an increment in kinetics of adhesion front movement. This is due to the natural negative charges of the cell wall membrane. In this thesis, an analytical model is proposed to... 

This thesis presents the results of an experimental and analytical study on the application of the strapping technique for seismic retrofit of reinforced concrete columns. In this technique, the columns are externally confined by post-tensioned metal strips. In the first phase of the experiments, the compressive stress-strain behavior of strapped cylindrical and prismatic specimens was studied. Effects of several parameters were studied including shape and size of specimens, strength of plain concrete, mechanical characteristics of confining strips and the level of pre-tensioning of the strips. The second phase of the tests included studying the lateral performance of strapped RC columns.... 

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are networks which consist entirely of mobile nodes, placed together in ad hoc manner, i.e. with minimal prior planning. In these networks, all nodes have routing capabilities and forward data packets for other nodes. Nodes can enter or leave the network at any time and may also be mobile. Hence, the network topology changes frequently. There are lots of challenges in these networks, which make routing to be a hard task. These challenges arise from the dynamic and unplanned nature of these networks such as unreliability of wireless communication, limited resources available in terms of bandwidth, processing capacity, network size, and etc. Due to these... 

In this thesis, a field effect transistor (FET) using armchair graphene nanoribbon as the channel is simulated, and the effects of changing nanoribbon width and length, as well as adding defects, are also studied. To obtain the Hamiltonian matrix and the energy band structure of graphene nanoribbon, tight binding method is used in which the first and third neighbor approximation is considered. Also, to maximize accuracy, we also considered the edge bond reconstruction. To obtain the transport characteristics of the transistor, such as the transmission coefficient and the density of states (DOS), Poisson and Schrodinger equations are solved self-consistently. We used the nonequilibrium... 

One of the most intrinsic challenges of flash-based Solid State Drives (SSDs) is erasebefore-write limitation and the limited endurance of flash chips. Wear leveling and garbage collection are two mechanisms implemented in SSD’s controller to enhance endurance and performance. While wear leveling attempts to distribute erasures across all blocks in an even manner, it imposes a new security challenge on SSD,which leads to the presence of invalid data blocks in flash chips. Therefore, some data blocks that are logically deleted by the user are still available in flash chips and can be recovered by software or hardware recovery tools.
In this paper, a new criteria named vulnerability time... 

The spine like every other mechanical pillar, is exposed to buckling and loss of stability. While existing biomechanical models emphasize the pressure force on the disk as the main cause of injury, there is also a possibility of local buckling phenomenon in vertebral discs. Because of the prevalence and high cost of lower back pain, it is essential to evaluate the forces carried by disks and lumbar muscles during occupational activities more accurately. In this regard, hybrid EMG-assisted optimization (EMGAO) approaches are most common methods for estimation of spinal loads. These models, not only use EMG data to be physiologically creditable, but also satisfy equilibrium requirements at all... 

Polychlorinated biphenyls are a group of hydrocarbons that are composed of two benzene rings and chlorine admixture on it. Due to their special properties, these materials were added to oils for years to improve their properties. These compounds have many industrial applications in various industries, such as the production of fluorescent lamps, adhesives, dyes, and especially as a cooling and insulating liquid as the Askarel oil in power transformers. Due to the properties of these compounds, which include stability and bioaccumulation in fatty tissues, the wide use of these substances causes environmental contamination and leads to a variety of cancerous diseases. Among the cleaning... 

In optimum design, the goal is to optimize the flow and heat transfer, considering the system limitations. In this research, inverse design is used as a new approach for optimization of aerodynamic ducts and shows that optimization of duct geometry is equivalent to the optimization of the pressure acting on the wall. In order to calculate the optimum pressure distribution, boundary layer equations were solved taking into account the pressure gradient. Moreover, with the help of genetic algorithm a pressure distribution can be obtained that offers the maximum pressure, avoiding fluid separation. It is obvious that this condition is equivalent to maximum pressure recovery in the aerodynamic... 

Nowadays, Resource Capacity Management (RCM) is one of the main challenges for industries which have a limited capacity to meet the demands. Revenue Management (RM) is a technique that controls the supply, improves the quality of Capacity Management and maximizes the revenue. Supplying the products and services to different groups of customers is a decision making problem.While the classic RM techniques take into account only the expected revenue, preferences of decision makers strongly affect the results. In this study, utility theory has been proposed because the healthcare industries are usually nonprofitable and they are not highly focused on the revenue gained by their products and... 

Whenever continuous and discrete dynamics interact, hybrid systems arise. Basically, models of such systems consisted of differential or difference equations to represent continuous dynamics and automata or other discrete variables to describe behavioral mode of the systems. Our main concern is focused on two types of hybrid systems: Discrete controllers which are combined with continuous physical process like biological systems can often be well described by hybrid systems. Our approach in this thesis deals with optimal multiple daily insulin injections which are introduced as an offline control approach on a simulated patient with type I diabetes. Simulated patient is provided via GlucoSim... 

As the core of this thesis, we express the relation between optimal transportation and convex geometry especially the variational approach to solve Alexandrov problem, which leads to a geometric interpretation to adversarial models and propose a novel framework for these models. Along the way, we peruse generative adversarial networks from optimal transportation view and show that generator calculates the transportation map and the discriminator computes Wasserestein distance, which is equivalent to Kantorovich potential. By using optimal mass transportation theory and choosing an especial cost function c, we see that the generator and discriminator are equivalent. Therefore, once the...