Sharif Digital Repository

The advancement in technology, information and communication has forced banks and financial institutions into hard competition. In this new era technology, people and customer are the elements which the banks are concentrating on them to manage customer relationship and success of banking in customer satisfaction. Electronic customer relationship management (e-CRM) is seen to arise from the consolidation of traditional CRM with the e-business applications marketplace and has created a flurry of activity among companies. The purpose of this study is to examine the competitive advantages on e-CRM in financial institutions and banks and obtain better understanding of the e-CRM benefits. A... 

Joining of yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) to stainless steels is considered for various applications such as solid oxide fuel cells, thermal barrier coatings, and medical implants. In the present work, a series of brazing pastes utilizing silver and nickel nanoparticles (∼80 nm) mixed with carboxymethyl cellulose as the organic phase were developed to join 5 mol% YSZ to AISI 420 steel. Effects of processing parameters including time and temperature of brazing and the composition of the nanopastes on the microstructure of joints and their shear rupture strength were studied. Elaboration of the joining mechanism by scanning electron microscopy and electron probe micro-analyzer showed... 

The In this paper, an Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO) method is proposed for parameter identification of highly coupled electromechanical systems. Using some modifications on the APSO, better computational efficiency is achieved. In this way, the speed of real-time identification procedure is improved. In addition, to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is implemented on a real ball on plate setup and its dynamic model is achieved. Both the simulation and the experimental results show that parameter identification of the proposed algorithm is significantly improved when compared with other existing identification methods based on the traditional PSO and Genetic... 

Leak detection based on acoustic emission needs robust time delay estimation in the presence of various types of noise. Considering several aspects of leakage signal and noise, the present work introduces wavelet based optimized residual complexity (WORC), in order to minimize the probability of false alarms in the presence of correlated, uncorrelated, and impulsive noise. The proposed method utilizes two approaches simultaneously. First, it optimizes residual complexity “for robustness against both correlated and uncorrelated noise”, then it employs wavelet basis in order to reduce the complexity of mixture of correlated and impulsive noise. In order to compare the resolution and percentage... 

In this paper, an innovative method is proposed for material selection. This method is based on the well-known weighting properties approach while integrating a new exponential function in the method to overcome the deficiencies of previously proposed methods. Using a maximum and minimum, in each significant aspect of the problem, for scaling, the values of material properties and achieving more realistic results by not emphasizing on any of the high and low extremes and using an exponential function that ranks the candidates regardless of their number, for improving the performance of the methodology and obtaining more absolute rankings, are some of the advantages of this method. The... 

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) are necessary when they are deployed in reality. In This paper, we have presented a combined method of selecting IDS agent nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. Since, the IDS agents in MANET due to more activities need to more battery power. In our method, first, compromised nodes are detected and then the nodes with the highest energy power from among valid nodes as IDS agent nodes are considered. So, with this method, some valid nodes contribute in intrusion detection activities and costs of the network monitoring will be reduced and the network lifetime will be increased. © 2009 IEEE  

Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET) due to different characteristics from wired networks are more vulnerable to security attacks. Construction of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) for MANETs is complicated by the fact that they are lack of fixed infrastructure and lack of central management for authentication and distribution of cryptographic keys. On the other hand, the network lifetime is an important issue in MANETs because of the energy power of mobile nodes is limited. In this paper is presented a proposed Method that in the first step, authorized nodes are detected by non-interactive zero knowledge technique and in the second step, nodes with the highest battery power from among authorized... 

Novel type of two-impinging-jets loop reactor (TIJLR) has been proposed and tested successfully for the solid-liquid catalytic reactions. The TIJLR was tested using the catalytic reaction of isomerization of D-glucose to D-fructose by immobilized glucose isomerase catalyst as a typical model system of solid-liquid catalytic reactions. The TIJLR is characterized by a high intensity reaction chamber, which is separated by a perforated plate from other parts of the reactor. The perforated plate was used as a filter to keep the catalyst particles within the reaction chamber. A compartment model with two adjustable parameters was considered to describe the pattern of flow within the reaction... 

One of the most important phenomena to affect the motion behaviour of Micro Resonators is their thermal dependency. This has recently received the attention of researchers widely. A thermal phenomenon has two main effects, the first is damping, due to internal friction, and the second is softening, due to Young's modulus-temperature relationship. In this research work, some theoretical and experimental reported results are used to make a proper model, including thermal phenomena. Two Lorentzian functions are used to describe the restoring and damping forces caused by thermal phenomena. In order to emphasize the thermal effects, a nonlinear model of the MEMS, considering capacitor... 

Liquid-liquid equilibrium (LLE) data, density, viscosity, and interfacial tension for the ternary system of toluene-acetic acid-water were measured at 298.15 K and 101.7 kPa. The Othmer-Tobias and the Hand correlations were used to check the reliability of the experimental tie-lines. Moreover, the distribution coefficient and the separation factor were explored. It was found from the experimental results that a maximum separation factor value happens at an acetic acid mass fraction of 0.02 in the organic phase. Density, viscosity, and interfacial tension were correlated using the appropriate correlations such that the predicted results have excellent agreement with the experimental data. The... 

This study presents and analyses a novel joint detection and parameters estimation of multiple targets using a co-located multiple input/multiple output radar with moving platform, in the presence of clutter and background noise. A notable feature of the proposed approach is that clutter cancellation is independent of received data. Moreover, to decrease the computational load, the authors propose to perform the target detection and parameters estimation by directly processing on the compressive measurements as opposed to Nyquist samples. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology  

In this research, we simulate the corrosive behavior of steel reinforcements on 5 different mixtures to investigate the effect of two powerful protective methods, including pozzolanic additives and corrosion inhibitor on concrete, by artificial neural networks (ANNs). Related to this model, fly ash (FA), micro silica (MS), and slag were used as pozzolanic materials at an optimum 25%, 10%, and 25% of cement weight, respectively. Moreover, Ferrogard 901 as an inhibitor was also utilized. The producer recommends using12 kg/m3 to get the best possible results. The non-linear corrosion of concrete into a marine solution (3.5% NaCl) was simulated by the feed forward back propagation (FFBP)... 

In this research, we simulate the corrosive behavior of steel reinforcements on 5 different mixtures to investigate the effect of two powerful protective methods, including pozzolanic additives and corrosion inhibitor on concrete, by artificial neural networks (ANNs). Related to this model, fly ash (FA), micro silica (MS), and slag were used as pozzolanic materials at an optimum 25%, 10%, and 25% of cement weight, respectively. Moreover, Ferrogard 901 as an inhibitor was also utilized. The producer recommends using12 kg/m3 to get the best possible results. The non-linear corrosion of concrete into a marine solution (3.5% NaCl) was simulated by the feed forward back propagation (FFBP)... 

In recent years, descriptive evaluation has been introduced as a new model for educational evaluation of Iranian students. The current descriptive evaluation method is based on four-valued logic. Assessing all students with only four values is led to a lack of relative justice and creation of unrealistic equality. Also, the complexity of the evaluation process in the current method increases teacher error’s likelihood. As a suitable solution, in this paper, a fuzzy descriptive evaluation system has been proposed. The proposed method is based on fuzzy logic, which is an infinite-valued logic, and it can perform approximate reasoning on natural language propositions. By the proposed fuzzy... 

Nylon 6 and 66 were toughened with EPDM-g-MA and SEBS-g-MA and steadystate rheological behaviour of rubbers, nylons and their blends and mechanical properties of nylons and their rubber-toughened blends were investigated. The EPDM maleic grafting preparation was performed In the framework of this study where SEBS-g-MA was obtained from a commercial source. The results showed the ultratoughened SEBS-g-MA blends, whereas EPDM blends under the same blending conditions did not show a significant improvement in toughness. In case of EPDM toughened blends an average of some micrometers was observed for the dispersed EPDM particles. Impact and tensile properties of the toughened blend with 20% of... 

Turbocharging of gasoline engines has been improved less than diesel engines due to some difficulties, especially knock phenomena. They require wider air flow range and faster response too. A computer code is developed to simulate turbocharged gasoline engine behavior. A three zone combustion model is employed. Different performance curves at speed and equivalence ratio ranges are prepared. By this code naturally aspirated and turbocharged behavior are compared. A turbocharged aftercooled engine has been studied in various cases to complete the investigation. Some aftercooler effects are described experimentally. Modeling and experimental results are compared providing valuable achievements.... 

Nonlinear numerical modeling of masonry-infilled frames is one of the most complicated problems in structural engineering field. This complexity is attributed to the existence of joints as the major source of weakness and material nonlinearities as well as the infill-frame interaction which cannot be properly modeled using the traditional finite element methods. Although there are many numerical studies available on solid masonry-infilled steel frames' behavior, however, few researches have been conducted on infilled frames with openings. In this paper a two-dimensional numerical model using the specialized discrete element method (DEM) software UDEC (2004) is developed for the nonlinear... 

The Gnutella protocol requires peers to broadcast messages to their neighbors when they search files. The message passing generates a lot of traffic in the network, which degrades the quality of service. We propose the new method to optimize the speed of search and to improve the quality of service in a Gnutella based peer-to-peer environment with using semantic routing and priority of nodes. Once peers generate their "friends lists", they use these lists to route queries in the network. This helps to reduce the search time and to decrease the network traffic by minimizing the number of messages circulating in the system as compared to standard Gnutella  

This article proposes the theory and implementation of an even-harmonic class-E CMOS oscillator that displays an excellent phase noise performance. Starting from zero voltage switching (ZVS) and zero derivative switching (ZDS) conditions, expressions for drain voltage and current waveforms are derived. Based on a 1:1 transformer, a custom-designed tank is proposed, which satisfies ZVS and ZDS conditions for the core transistors, provides high-Q resonances at both fundamental and second harmonics of the oscillation frequency, and yields a passive voltage gain from the drain to the gate of the core transistors. Satisfying ZVS and ZDS conditions reduces the overlap between the voltage and... 

In this paper, a new computational technique is presented based on the eXtended Finite Element Method (X-FEM) in pressure-sensitive plasticity of powder compaction considering frictional contact. In X-FEM, the need for mesh adaption to discontinuity interface is neglected and the process is accomplished by partitioning the domain with some triangular sub-elements whose Gauss points are used for integration of the domain of the elements. The technique is applied by employing additional functions, which are added to approximate the displacement field of the elements located on the interface. The double-surface cap plasticity model is employed within the X-FEM framework in numerical simulation...