Sharif Digital Repository

Considerable portion of energy losses in a vehicle traced to tire. Energy losses in a tire are due to tire longitudinal slip as well as rolling resistance. Hence, both of aforementioned factors must take into the consideration to study the tire energy loss. Present paper aims to investigate the power losses in tires and to examine influence of road conditions and tire inflation pressure on them. To cover the real-world conditions, experiments were done on a gasoline-fueled passenger vehicle on an urban highway along two routes with same length and opposite gradients to comprise the change of road conditions. Then, by use of engine performance model which is prepared in dynamometer... 

The aim of the present study was to experimentally investigate the interaction between a low replacement ratio of different nano-particles (SiO2, Al2O3, clay, and CaCO3) and aminosilane in the matrices of cement paste and mortar. Results showed that the optimum content of aminosilane for improving the 28-day compressive strength of cement mortar was 0.75% (by weight of the total binder). The utilization of nano-SiO2 and nano-clay particles improved the strengths of the cement mortar containing hybrid systems of nano-particles/aminosilane at early (7 days) and middle curing ages (28 and 91 days). The 28-day compressive strength enhancement of cement mortar with hybrid systems of nano-SiO... 

An architectural modification method was utilized to improve fracture toughness of discontinuously reinforced aluminum (DRA) composites. Al-DRA composites having a structure similar to that of reinforced concrete were fabricated. The number of reinforcing DRA rods within Al matrix and volume fraction of SiC particles in DRA were altered to evaluate their effect on fracture behavior of these materials. It was found that architectural modification does not have any destructive influence on elastic modulus and yield strength of the composite. Moreover, the success of this method on toughness improvement strongly depends on the occurrence of debonding between Al and DRA regions upon loading  

Gold nanotubes/nanowires (GNT/NW) were synthesized by using the template-assisted electrodeposition technique and mixed with castor oil-polyethylene glycol based polyurethane (PU) to fabricate porous composite scaffolds for biomedical application. 100 and 50 ppm of GNT/NW were used to synthesize composites. The composite scaffolds were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, dynamic mechanical thermal analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, and scanning electron microscopy. Cell attachment on polyurethane-GNT/NW composites was investigated using fat-derived mesenchymal stem cells. Addition of 50 or 100 ppm GNT/NW had significant effects on thermal, mechanical, and cell... 

Gas injection is the second largest enhanced oil recovery process being applied in many reservoirs around the world. Simulation of these processes is necessary for implementation, management, and decision making. Relative permeability is one of the most important factors in numerical reservoir simulation. In this study, several core flood experiments are done and the relative permeability in carbon dioxide (CO2) injection is compared with nitrogen (N2) injection. Oil relative permeability in CO 2 injection is found to be higher than in N2 injection, but gas relative permeability in CO2 injection is found to be lower than in N2 injection. Higher oil relative permeability in CO 2 injection... 

Solid inflation can support a long period of anisotropic inflation. We calculate the statistical anisotropies in the scalar and tensor power spectra and their cross-correlation in anisotropic solid inflation. The tensor-scalar cross-correlation can either be positive or negative, which impacts the statistical anisotropies of the TT and TB spectra in CMB map more significantly compared with the tensor self-correlation. The tensor power spectrum contains potentially comparable contributions from quadrupole and octopole angular patterns, which is different from the power spectra of scalar, the cross-correlation or the scalar bispectrum, where the quadrupole type statistical anisotropy dominates... 

Bioinspired materials can mimic the stem cell environment and modulate stem cell differentiation and proliferation. In this study, biomimetic micro/nanoenvironments were fabricated by cell-imprinted substrates based on mature human keratinocyte morphological templates. The data obtained from atomic force microscopy and field emission scanning electron microscopy revealed that the keratinocyte-cell-imprinted poly(dimethylsiloxane) casting procedure could imitate the surface morphology of the plasma membrane, ranging from the nanoscale to the macroscale, which may provide the required topographical cell fingerprints to induce differentiation. Gene expression levels of the genes analyzed... 

Injecting low salinity brines is regarded as an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process through IFT reduction. However, the exact mechanism behind this process is an unsettled and complex issue that has not been well understood yet, especially for heavy crude oil system. Besides, limited information is available regarding the key heavy oil/brine interfacial tension (IFT). The present study aims to investigate the sensitivity of dead heavy crude oil/brine IFT to a wide range of properties/conditions and to reveal the underlying physicochemical mechanisms involved in enhanced oil recovery and IFT reduction by low salinity water injection into heavy oil reservoir. IFT was measured as a function of... 

The interfacial tension (IFT) of a crude oil/CO2 system is recognized as the main property affecting the efficiency of CO2 flooding during an enhanced oil recovery (EOR) process. The addition of a paraffin group hydrocarbon to asphaltenic crude oils as an asphaltene precipitant component is aimed to mimic the asphaltene precipitation process during crude oil production and transportation. Asphaltene precipitation would critically affect the interfacial behavior of crude oil/CO2 systems. In the first part of this study, the equilibrium densities of oil samples which contain n-heptane at different ratios were measured over varying pressures at 323 K. Then, the equilibrium IFT between CO2 and... 

A two dimensional rectangular microchannel with circular micropillars was modeled in the presence of an electric field. Continuity and Navier-Stokes equations were solved along with convection-diffusion equation using finite element method. Reaction phenomenon was applied via a partial differential equation on the reaction surfaces and electric force was added as a source term to the transport equations. Velocity, concentration and electric potential distributions were obtained, with the aid of which, capture efficiency and average surface concentration of reaction surfaces were calculated. To ameliorate the reaction rate, different designs of reaction surfaces were investigated; the designs... 

We outline a comprehensive numerical procedure for modeling of species transport and surface reaction kinetics in electrokinetically actuated microfluidic devices of rectangular cross section. Our results confirm the findings of previous simplified approaches that a concentration wave is created for sufficiently long microreactors. An analytical solution, developed for the wave propagation speed, shows that, when normalizing with the fluid mean velocity, it becomes a function of three parameters comprising the channel aspect ratio, the relative adsorption capacity, and the kinetic equilibrium constant. Our studies also reveal that the reactor geometry idealized as a slit, instead of a... 

Asphaltene precipitation problems manifest themselves in different stages of oil reservoirs production. Experimental and modeling investigations are, therefore, employed as promising tools to assist in predictions of asphaltene precipitation problems and selection of proper production facilities. This study concerns experimental and modeling investigations of asphaltene precipitation during natural production and gas injection operations for a heavy Iranian crude oil at reservoir conditions. First, with design and performance of high pressure-high temperature experiments, asphaltene precipitation behavior is comprehensively investigated; the effects of pressure and temperature are fully... 

Context. The extrasolar planet WASP-67 b is the first hot Jupiter definitively known to undergo only partial eclipses. The lack of the second and third contact points in this planetary system makes it difficult to obtain accurate measurements of its physical parameters  

Early diagnosis of any disease at a lower cost is preferable. Automatic medical diagnosis classification tools reduce financial burden on health care systems. In medical diagnosis, patterns consist of observable symptoms and the results of diagnostic tests, which have various associated costs and risks. In this paper, we have experimented and suggested an automated pattern classification method for classifying four diseases into two classes. In the literature on machine learning or data mining, regression and classification problems are typically viewed as two distinct problems differentiated by continuous or categorical dependent variables. There are endeavors to use regression methods to... 

Deposition of barium sulfate (or BaSO4) has already been recognized as a devastating problem facing process industries and oilfield operations, mainly owing to its low solubility in aqueous solutions. Predicting and also preventing the overall damage caused by BaSO4 precipitation requires a profound knowledge of its solubility under different thermodynamic conditions. The main aim of this study is to develop a solubility prediction model based on a hybrid of least squares support vector nachines (LSSVM) and coupled simulated annealing (CSA) aiming to predict the solubility of barium sulfate over wide ranges of temperature, pressure and ionic compositions. Results indicate that predictions of... 

Dijet production has been measured in pPb collisions at a nucleon–nucleon centre-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV. A data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35 nb−1 was collected using the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The dijet transverse momentum balance, azimuthal angle correlations, and pseudorapidity distributions are studied as a function of the transverse energy in the forward calorimeters (E4<|η|<5.2 T). For pPb collisions, the dijet transverse momentum ratio and the width of the distribution of dijet azimuthal angle difference are comparable to the same quantities obtained from a simulated pp reference and insensitive to E4<|η|<5.2 T. In... 

The use of commercially available 2,6-bis(diphenylphosphino)pyridine as a ligand in conjunction with K2CO3, DMAc and TBAB is an effective method for the palladium-catalyzed CN coupling of a variety of aryl halides with anilines, N-heterocyclic aromatic amines, and a cyclic secondary amine. The reactions proceed in good to excellent yield (up to 98%) while the loading of Pd(OAc)2 was as low as 0.025 mol %  

PbS on Pb thin film (Pb/PbS) was deposited on conductive glass (CG) substrate (CG/Pb/PbS) using electrochemical techniques to investigate the Schottky junction in solution. The CG/Pb/PbS electrode was investigated by different techniques based on thermionic emission theory. Electrochemical cell consisted of the CG/Pb/PbS as a working electrode in an alkaline solution showed character of the Schottky junction. Reduction and oxidation of H2O on the CG/Pb/PbS electrode were enhanced under illumination. Water photo splitting is the main process. Study of linear sweep voltammetry at around open circuit potential (OCP) allowed proposing a model based on the Schottky junction which is charged at... 

Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a popular policy in supply chain management (SCM) to decrease bullwhip effect. Since the transportation cost plays an important role in VMI and because the demands are often fuzzy, this paper develops a VMI model in a multi-retailer single-vendor SCM under the consignment stock policy. The aim is to find optimal retailers' order quantities so that the total inventory and transportation cost are minimized while several constraints are satisfied. Because of the NP-hardness of the problem, an algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed to find a near optimum solution, where the centroid defuzzification method is employed for... 

This paper presents an adaptive controller to achieve consensus tracking for the fractional-order linear time invariant swarm systems in which the matrices describing the agent dynamics and the interactive dynamics between agents are unknown. This controller consists of two parts: an adaptive stabilizer and an adaptive tracker. The adaptive stabilizer guarantees the asymptotic swarm stability of the considered swarm system. Also, the adaptive tracker enforces the system agents to track a desired trajectory while achieving consensus. Numerical simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller. Copyright