Sharif Digital Repository

This paper studies fractional-order systems of retarded type with two independent delays, and determines the stability regions in spaces of delays. In this approach, an auxiliary polynomial is employed to calculate all purely imaginary roots of the characteristic equation of the system on the imaginary axis. Since roots of the characteristic equation are continuous with respect to delays, these purely imaginary roots determine the stability regions in delay space. Also, the necessary and sufficient condition for stability independent of delays is developed for the systems. Furthermore, a simple inequality constraint is established to obtain pure imaginary poles of the scalar systems.... 

In this article, we find a lower bound for the blow-up time of solutions to some nonlinear parabolic equations under Robin boundary conditions in bounded domains of Rn  

In nonlinear acoustic regime, a body insonified by a sound field is known to experience a steady force that is called the acoustic radiation force (RF). This force is a second-order quantity of the velocity potential function of the ambient medium. Exploiting the sufficiency of linear solution representation of potential function in RF formulation, and following the classical resonance scattering theorem (RST) which suggests the scattered field as a superposition of the resonant field and a background (non-resonant) component, we will show that the radiation force is a composition of three components: background part, resonant part and their interaction. Due to the nonlinearity effects, each... 

Superparamagnetic ZnFe2O4/reduced graphene oxide (rGO) composites containing ZnFe2O4 nanoparticles (with ∼5-20 nm sizes) attached onto rGO sheets (with ∼1 μm lateral dimensions) were synthesized by hydrothermal reaction method. By increasing the graphene content of the composite from 0 to 40 wt%, the size as well as the number of the ZnFe2O4 nanoparticles decreased and the saturated magnetization of the composites reduced from 10.2 to 1.8 emu/g, resulting in lower responses to external magnetic fields. Concerning this, the time needed for 90% separation of ZnFe2O4/rGO (40 wt%) composite from its solution (2 mg/mL in ethanol) was found 60 min in the presence of an external magnetic field (∼1... 

In this article, we report the first multiwalled carbon nanotube-polyelectrolyte gel containing vinylimidazolium-typed ionic liquid monomer as an absorbent of less-polar or nonpolar organic solvents. To prepare such MWCNT-polyelectrolyte gel, the modified MWCNTs with polymerizable vinyl groups on their surfaces were prepared and then underwent copolymerizations with dodecyl methacrylate and vinylimidazolium in the presence of AIBN as initiator, yielding a cross-linked polyelectrolyte. In order to estimate the compatibility between the solvents and the polymers, a series of vinylimidazolium-typed ionic liquid monomers ([Cnvim][X]) with different alkyl tail length (C6, C10 and C12) and counter... 

The catalyst's performance and deactivation in a Midrex® industrial fixed bed reactor were investigated for the combined steam and dry reforming of natural gas using a one-dimensional heterogeneous model. The results demonstrate that there is a strong tendency for the catalyst's deactivation by carbon formation originating from methane decomposition. However, kinetic modelling of the combined reforming process shows that only a fraction of the catalyst in the industrial reactor is required for the reactions to reach an equilibrium state in the reformer. Hence, as the catalyst is deactivated at the reactor entrance area, the reaction zone gradually moves forward and still allows for... 

A molecular dynamics simulation of the shock-wave propagation in the face-centered cubic (FCC) structured C60 fullerene along the <100>, <110> and <111> crystallographic directions is performed. For this purpose, the response of the material under different shock-wave loadings is studied through Hugoniot curves. Three regimes of the material behavior have been observed from fully elastic to elastic-plastic to plastic. The Hugoniot elastic limit and the phase transition are also investigated along different crystallographic directions. It is shown that the shock wave travels faster along the <110> and <111> directions than in the <100> direction in the material. Comparing the results with the... 

Quasi-3D plasmonic nanostructures consisting of a metallic film perforated as an array of nanoholes, separated by a gap from a nanodisk array, are theoretically investigated under plane wave illumination with transverse electric and transverse magnetic polarizations. The results are compared with the results of a simple nanodisk array. A full discussion involving the couplings between plasmon resonance in nanodisks, surface plasmon polaritons on the interfaces of metallic film, and different diffractive grating orders that contribute in the couplings will be presented. The large difference between the plasmon behavior of the nanodisk array alone and nanodisk array in the presence of nanohole... 

Decimal arithmetic has gained intensive attention in the last decade. Most commercial, financial, scientific, and internet-based applications need their data to be precise, while binary number system loses preciseness in some cases. The latency and area are two major factors in existing research works on decimal multiplication. However, energy/power consumption is another important factor in today's digital systems. Hence, in this paper we proposed a new low power decimal adder based on prediction technique for decreasing the energy/power consumption of parallel decimal multiplication and show its impacts on one of the well-known parallel decimal multipliers architecture. Our observations... 

In this research the parallel machine scheduling problem with preemption by considering a constant transportation delay for migrated jobs and minimization of makespan as the criterion i.e., Pm|pmtn(delay)|Cmax is investigated. It is assumed that when a preempted job resumes on another machine, it is required a delay between the processing time of the job on these two machines. This delay is called transportation delay. We criticize an existing mathematical model for the research problem in the literature [Boudhar M, Haned A. Preemptive scheduling in the presence of transportation times. Computers & Operations Research 2009; 36(8):2387-93]. Then, we prove that there exists an optimal schedule... 

In this work, the effects of rolling parameters, cooling media, and deformation path on mechanical properties and aging behavior of hot-rolled AA2017 were studied. First, hot-rolling experiments were conducted under different working conditions, and the rolled strips were then aged at room temperature for up to 57 days during which hardness and tensile tests were carried out to record the changes in the mechanical properties of the alloy. Furthermore, due to the importance of static recrystallization on subsequent aging behavior, the rate of recrystallization was also computed. To this end, a mathematical model was developed to predict thermomechanical responses during hot rolling using the... 

In this paper, a new approach for controlling the sway angle of the load in trolley cranes is presented which is based on the flexibility of the cable and variation of its length by the time. The crane dynamics has been described by hybrid PDE and ODE equations which uses the PDE as the equations of motion for the flexible cable and ODE for those of the trolley and the load. The purpose of the controller is to transport the load to the desired position and to eliminate its sway angle at the destination. The control law is based on the Lyapunov's second method. The efficiency of the proposed controller is demonstrated via various simulations  

Researchers and practicing engineers have come to this realization that different mixtures should be used for different climate and traffic conditions. Rutting is one of the main performance related types of distress in areas where the asphalt pavement is subjected to heavy axle loads and high temperature. In this research various types of SMA mixtures were tested to evaluate their effectiveness for inhibiting rutting. The variables in the laboratory tests were aggregate gradation  

In this work a new method for analyzing nanostructured materials has been proposed to accelerate the simulations for solid crystalline materials. The proposed Structural Approximation Method (SAM) is based on Molecular Dynamics (MD) and the accuracy of the results can also be improved in a systematic manner by sacrificing the simulation speed. In this method a virtual material is used instead of the real one, which has less number of atoms and therefore fewer degrees of freedom, compared to the real material. The number of differential equations that must be integrated in order to specify the state of the system will decrease significantly, and the simulation speed increases. To generalize... 

Decision on the location of new wells through infill drilling projects is a complex problem that depends on the reservoir rock and fluid properties, well and surface facilities specifications, and economic measures. Conventional approach to address this is a direct optimization that uses the numerical flow simulation. However, this is computationally very extensive. In this study the authors use a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) optimization technique based on the genetic algorithm (GA) with helper functions based on the polytope algorithm and the neural network. This hybridization introduces hill-climbing into the stochastic search and makes use of proxies created and calibrated iteratively... 

Simultaneous capillary dominated displacement of the wetting and non-wetting phases are processes of interest in many disciplines including modeling of the penetration of polluting liquids in hydrology or the secondary migration in petroleum reservoir engineering. Percolation models and in particular invasion percolation is well suited to characterize the slow immiscible displacement of two fluids when both the gravity and viscous effects are negligible. In particular, the characteristic of the percolating cluster and the other important percolation properties at the breakthrough can be inferred. However, with the inclusion of the gravity forces, the behavior may change. For example, as the... 

A novel mesoporous silica-functionalized dual Brønsted acidic species has been introduced as an efficient catalyst for solvent-free esterification of fatty acids with ethanol. The structure of the catalyst has been characterized by FT-IR spectroscopy, thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA), TEM and N2 adsorption-desorption. TGA of catalyst 1 showed no weight loss before 200 °C, indicating a high degree of hydrophobicity of the surface of the mesoporous silica. TEM images and nitrogen adsorption-desorption showed no noticeable changes to the structure of the catalyst before and after acid treatment. pH metric analysis was performed for the catalyst to determine the loading of the acidic sites.... 

Global economic expansion and increasing concentration of people in the large cities, especially in developing countries leads to some environmental issues such as air pollution. Relocation of the firms as a great air pollutant can be an appropriate alternative for diminishing these pollutions. Yet, there is a lack of research about factors precluding firm relocation with respect to decision making factors when determining whether or not to relocate. Thus, the purpose of this case study is to examine firm relocation decision-making factors and to apprehend the role of environment issues in making them using a combination of SWOT matrix and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The combination... 

The Gaussian mixture probability hypothesis density (GM-PHD) filter is a closed form approximation of the multi-target Bayes filter which can overcome most multitarget tracking problems. Limited field of view, decreasing cost of cameras, and advances of using multi-camera induce us to use large-scale camera networks. In this paper, a multihuman tracking framework using the PHD filter in a distributed camera network is proposed. Each camera tracks objects locally with PHD filter and a track-after-detect scheme and its estimates of targets are sent to neighboring nodes. Then each camera fuses its local estimates with it's neighbors. The proposed method is evaluated on the public PETS2009... 

Light scattering design in dye and quantum dot sensitized solar cells is one of the main concerns in enhancing their light harvesting efficiency, and also in improving their power conversion efficiency. Herein, we present a theoretical analysis to calculate the dependence of the light scattering efficiency in dye solar cells that have employed scattering agents with various sizes and morphologies incorporated in nanostructured photoanodes with different designs. Various isotropic and anisotropic nanostructures, including filled and hollow spheres, spherical voids, nanowires and hollow fibres in a size range of 100 nm to 900 nm, have been considered as scattering centres. The scattering...