Sharif Digital Repository

Adsorption of violet B azo dye from aqueous solutions was studied by different cellulose agricultural waste materials (almond shell (AS), pistachio shell (PS), walnut shell (WS), Tea waste (TW) and orange peel (OP)). Cellulose agriculturalwaste sorbents characterized by FTIR and SEM methods. The effects of different parameters such as contact time, pH, adsorbent dosage and initial dye concentration were studied. Maximum removal of dye was obtained at contact time of 90 min and pH 11. The adsorption of violet B was fitted by pseudo-second-order kinetic model. The Langmuir isotherm model was better fitted than Freundlichmodel. The results showed that the adsorption efficiency of violet B by... 

Water allocation is a process of identifying the stakeholders, assessing the amount of water they need, and estimating the volume of renewable water resources. This study investigates the coalition possibilities among the riparian in the Aras River as a transboundary basin over-allocating the environmental flow share. To this end, first, the environmental flow is estimated downstream of the basin based on the annual potential runoff. Then, to estimate the agricultural production function in each country, the relationship between the agriculture value-added and the variables like annual potential runoff and capital in the agricultural sector is derived using the seemingly unrelated regression... 

The application of agricultural fibers for making particleboards has been studied in two types of composites: (i) type I particleboards were composites of wheat straw and rice husk fibers with polymeric methylene di-phenyl diisocyanate resin (pMDI) as a binder made by compression moulding; (ii) type II particleboards were composites of rice husk and polypropylene made by extrusion and injection moulding. In type I particleboards, the effects of varying the resin content and various combinations of wheat straw/rice husk fibers were investigated and characterised in terms of physical and mechanical properties of particle boards such as modulus of rupture, modulus of elasticity, compression... 

In recent decades, population growth, agricultural development and climate change have caused environmental problems in the world, especially in the arid and semi-arid regions such as Iran. Urmia Lake, one of the unique biosphere reserves of the world, has suffered from these problems in the last 20 years. Although many studies conducted to the negative impacts of human-induced activities, especially agricultural expansion on the lake, few studies focused on providing restoration plans for that. This study uses a system dynamics method for modelling the restorations scenarios of Urmia Lake based on the prey-predator approach. This method is helpful to simplify the complicated feedbacks and... 

Sol-gel based solid-phase microextraction fibers supported by a stainless steel wire were fabricated and employed for GC-MS determination of oxadiargyl in real samples. The fibers were based on four compounds with different polarity: polar and non-polar (end-capped) poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS), polyethylene glycol (PEG), and poly(ethylene-propyleneglycol)-monobutyl ether (UCON). For this purpose, the surface of the stainless steel was initially modified by (3-mercaptopropyl) trimethoxysilane. The results of the modification procedure were evaluated by cyclic voltammetry and energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectroscopy. After the modification, four different sol-gel based SPME fibers with... 

Biofuels are important alternative fuel in recent years. In this work, the bioethanol supply chain planning is performed by BioEnergy Supply Model to optimally find the best pathways using economic and environmental objective functions in Iran. Then, different sustainability criteria focusing on environmental, economic, and social concerns are assessed for possible routes of the bioethanol production from available resources. Although agriculture residues and wastes, decrease the greenhouse gas emissions but municipal solid wastes are more economic and require less water. The agricultural wastes and residues improve the sustainability. Then, criteria focusing on environmental, economic, and... 

We develop a method for predicting the moisture content of the fermenting solids in an intermittently mixed packed-bed bioreactor on the basis of measurements of the inlet and outlet gas stream temperatures and the assumption that both the gas streams are saturated with water vapor. This method can be used to estimate when an intermittently mixed packed bed should be mixed and how much water should be added during the mixing event. The predictions were experimentally verified for the growth of Aspergillus niger on wheat bran in a thin packed bed. We show that the application of a controller based on our estimation method would have led to adequate moisture control, with significant errors in... 

This study aims to construct a quantitative framework to assess biological production of hydrogen from agricultural residues in a country or region. The presented model is able to determine proper crops for biohydrogen production, its possible applications and use as well as environmental aspects. A multiplicative decomposition method was designed to forecast future production and Monte Carlo simulation was employed in the model to evaluate the risk of estimations. From 2013 to 2050, the hydrogen production capacity could increase from 53.59 to 164.41 kilotonnes (kt) in Iran. The highest contribution to biohydrogen production (52.1% in 2013 and 73.3% in 2050) belongs to cereal crops... 

Food, energy, and water (FEW) resources have high interconnection and interdependencies as each resource can be affected by the other two. Thus, the Nexus approach is introduced and implemented to manage FEW. This chapter discusses each sector of FEW: availability, production, consumption, interaction, and interconnection between them, and finally suggests some action to improve the operation of the Nexus. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020  

Fault coverage and test time have important roles in using Built in self-test (BIST). Two parameters are crucial and effective in BIST design: LFSR's polynomial (or configuration) and its initial seed. In this paper we propos a practical method for finding near optimal LFSR with genetic algorithm (GA) and show that LFSR is a good TPG compared with other TPGs. In this method, the candidate seeds are achieved through a deterministic approach, and an evolutionary approach is employed to obtain the LFSR configurations for the desired fault coverage under test time constraint. The configurations are encoded in binary chromosomes. The evolution process evolves the fittest configurations to achieve... 

The rapid changes of the climate and the environment requires smart solutions and deployment of intelligent automated systems in agriculture and environment management. Rural communities should use artificial intelligence and big data analytics solutions in order to be able to mitigate the effects of climate change in the next decades. The Eco-Cyber-Physical-System (ecoCystem) is a combination of the living entities of the ecosystem in conjunction with the Cyber-Physical System (CPS) based components of the smart rural environments, interacting as a system. The goal of the ecoCystem is to use the power of artificial intelligence combined with Internet of Things (IOT) in order to provide... 

In this study, Glucoamylase production by Aspergillus niger was investigated under solid state fermentation using low cost by-products of agricultural processes as substrate. Highest enzyme production was observed when a combination of wheat bran (WB) and corn flour (CF) was used as compared to WB+ rice bran, WB+ rice flour and WB alone. Several compositions of corn flours were experimented. The best combination of WB in addition of 10% corn flour resulted maximum enzyme activities. Study of the fermentations in flasks revealed 373.3 IU/gds and 41.4 g/l for the enzyme activity and protein concentration respectively under conditions of 30± 1°C, pH 4.7 and time 96 h. Optimum conditions... 

Occurrence of drought, as an inevitable natural climate feature, cannot be ceased while happening. However, costs of the consequences could be alleviated using mature scientific integrated approaches. To reduce the amount of damage, it is required to provide “Contingency” and “Mitigation” action plans. For this reason, development of efficient operating instructions for various regions based on weather conditions and field studies is needed as well as having a sophisticated understanding of socioeconomic situations. This paper describes an approach to provide the first national agricultural drought risk management plan for a river basin in Iran country as a pilot. The study lasted for... 

Steel silos are one of the main structures for bulk solids handling and storage in many industries and agricultural sectors. A growing body of research suggests the importance of including the vertical component of earthquake ground motion in seismic analysis and design of certain structures. In the case of steel silos, this may induce additional meridional compression to exacerbate buckling failures in such thin shells. Accordingly, this paper investigates the buckling behavior of three cylindrical steel silos (i.e., a squat, an intermediate slender and a slender silo) with stepped walls subjected to horizontal only (H) and horizontal and vertical (HV) ground accelerations to address this... 

Lake Urmia in Iran has undergone catastrophic desiccation due to increasing anthropogenic development, especially in the agricultural sector. A paramount national goal is to restore the lake to its former healthy condition, but corresponding water governance and restoration efforts have encountered various, mostly human-related, challenges. We argue here that these challenges stem from lack of awareness and insufficient consideration of the local social conditions and the subtleties of human-water interactions, which we collectively refer to as socio-hydrological barriers. Ignorance of such socio-hydrological barriers can lead to policy efforts that are mismatched with local realities and,... 

An optical apta-nanosensor was designed and developed based on reduced graphene quantum dots (rGQDs) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and applied for the selective detection of diazinon as one of the most widely used organophosphorus pesticides. Considering the GQDs and rGQDs high fluorescence emission and optical stability, efficient optical transducers could be designed and precise detection methods could be developed based on such transducers. Herein, by using rGQDs, diazinon specific aptamer, and MWCNTs, a simple economical fluorescence method has been introduced to detect and measure diazinon with the detection limit of 0.4 nM (0.1 μg/L) in the range of 4-31 nM, meeting the...