Sharif Digital Repository

Development of novel photosensitizers and photocatalysts with near-infrared (NIR) light activity and efficient sunlight harvesting is of great importance in photodynamic therapy and environmental remediation. In this work, very small (20 nm) upconverter SrF2:Yb,Tm@CaF2:Yb@Fluorine-doped TiO2 heteronanoparticles (denoted as UCNPs@TiO2) with strong UV-blue emission and wide-spectrum photocatalytic activity were synthesized via a facile three-step hydrothermal method, for the first time. The SrF2: Yb,Tm upconverter nanoparticles were produced as the light-emitting core, epitaxially-grown CaF2 : Yb as the middle shell to enhance the Upconversion luminescence efficiency and TiO2 as the... 

The aim of conducting this research is to study, fabrication and photocatalytic application of electrospun ZnO-based composite nanofibers. One of the most important challenges is to apply photocatalyst under solar irradiation and improve its activity for pollutant degradation. ZnO is a wide band gap semiconductor, hence, it is not active under the visible light. In Iran, we have at least 300 sunny days in a year. Therefore, fabrication and application of photocatalytic material with activity under the sunlight which contains 47% of visible light is so vital in our country. Since CuO is a visible light active photocatalyst and its interface with ZnO forms a type I heterojunction, this... 

The capability of Bushehr nuclear power plant spray system to reduce fission product and control a specified severe accident has been investigated in this study. In order to evaluate spray system in one of the worst cases for containment, we have chosen Large Break Loss of Coolant Accident (LB-LOCA) without access to active part of ECCS system. We have only simulated containment, so the leakage of various materials from core and primary circuit of nuclear power plant are considered as the boundary conditions for simulation. Following the Fukushima accident in 2011, many nuclear safety legislative groups concentrated on using mobile equipment which is essential for nuclear power plants these... 

In this study, membrane distillation process was used for treatment of high salinity waters. The focus of this study is to simulate and build a setup of membrane distillation process. Since the membrane distillation process is based on the driving force of the temperature difference, the required temperature is provided by both the use of heaters and the use of solar energy. To increase the feed temperature by solar energy, a black polymer coating on the main membrane is used. The main membrane used in this process is PVDF polymer and the polymer coated on the surface is the PAN polymer. After simulating and constructing the laboratory setup, the influence of a variety of parameters on the... 

The energy systems efficiency is a great issue confront power plants professionals. Besides using high-tech components in power plants, plant operation optimization can significantly improve energy efficiency and economic performance, as efficiency of plant components generally depends on operating conditions. In addition, system preventive maintenance can reduce plant operation and failure costs, however it is also costly when done frequently. Therefore, optimizing operating conditions and preventive maintenance intervals can minimize the expected total cost of plant due to operation, failures and preventive maintenances. In recent years, the use of optimization models to determine plant... 

The short life of Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) fuel cells is one of the critical criteria to their commercialization. A longer operation life time should be achieved to reach high reliability, low $/kWh cost and to use fuel cells as economical alternative energy systems.Therefore,diagnosing degradation mechanisms and the causes of power loss in fuel cell life time is of great importance. Operating conditions affect output power density and performance degradation. To achieve maximum power generation through fuel cell life time, a model is needed which is able to estimate power density and performance degradation simultaneously regarding to operating conditions. In present work, a... 

Destruction of green lands, especially forests, is one of the most common forms of environmental degradation. Meanwhile, political institutions can play an important role in protecting or destroying the environment, especially forests. The creation of town and village councils as a change in political institutions and decentralization can have an impact on the environment. Land use change, implementation of development projects and the task of overseeing the implementation of environmental protection laws are among the duties and powers of councils that affect the coverage of various areas. At different eras, town and village councils’ elections have been annulled or dissolved in a... 

Due to the continuing progress in CMOS technology and increased number of cores within a chip, multiple components with different levels of criticality have been integrated into a common hardware platform. These systems with these characteristics are known as Mixed-Criticality Systems (MCS). Also, due to the migration towards multi-core systems, power consumption and specifically instantaneous power consumption is the main concern. To avoid the use of cooling technology, we need to reduce the instantaneous power consumption of the system. However, most existing approaches in MCS have paid attention to reliability guaranteed and energy minimization. Therefore, we consider a dynamic scheduling... 

In recent years, because of the increase in population and more accessibility of health facilities for people, an increase has occurred in water resources consumption. Recycling water has become so much valuable as the freshwater of the world is limited. Besides the advantages of treated water has for people, discharging the untreated wastewater to the rivers could cause many problems for human health. Many kinds of pollutions, such as textile effluent, are not easy to be treated by traditional methods because of their resistance to them. As these types of wastewater have severe negative effects on living things (both humans and animals), new treatment technologies should be considered. The... 

Soils have an anisotropic response, and mechanical and dynamic properties of this material are greatly dependent on the direction and magnitude of principal stresses. A reliable assessment of the soil behavior and a good estimation of the soil parameters need to perform tests in similar condition with in-situ. From all the devices used for studying anisotropy of soils, hollow cylinder apparatus is the only apparatus that enables an independent control of both the direction and magnitude of the principal stresses. Moreover, one of the most controversial topics in the unsaturated soil dynamics is determining the shear modulus and damping ratio which are used for assessing many geotechnical... 

Up till now, various contributions of research to soil-structure-interaction context have been primarily focused on structural systems exhibiting elastic-perfectly plastic material behavior. In this paper, combined effects of material degradation, p-delta, and soil-structure-interaction considering foundation uplift have been deemed to determine seismic response of a single degree of freedom system. The system is composed of a column with a lumped mass on top that is placed on a rigid foundation. The foundation is mounted on Winkler springs and dashpots to account for soil-foundation compliance and material/radiational damping. The springs are tensionless to guarantee that uplift phenomenon... 

The effect of soil structure interaction, on displacement modification factor in constant reduction factors (CR) is evaluated, studied for SDOF structures placed on flexible base modeled by 3DOF system as the base foundation (a sway, a rocking and an internal degree of freedom to see the frequency dependency of dynamic stiffness of soil). 60 records of FEMA-440 for 3 types of soils (B, C and D) are analyzed for 28 different soil-structure conditions, 6 different level of reduction factors, and varied secondary hardening for 2 different hysteresis behavior to see the effect of stiffness hardening. Results are plotted in spectrums to see the role of Tn.
Final results show that effect of... 

The tolerance stack-up in mechanical assemblies is closely related to the quality of finished products and to the costs of production. In practice, choosing a large tolerance range will result in performance reduction. On the other hand, with small tolerances considered, production costs will increase. Tolerance allocation is a useful tool to control the dimensional and geometric variables of the product, so design engineers can control the final product quality level, production cost, and other variables. The proposed method for tolerance design considers the effects of degradation and quality loss over time and allocates tolerances so that, the functional key characteristic satisfies, as... 

Polypropylene is a semi-crystalline thermoplastic used in various industries and the second most used polymer globally. Polypropylene is sensitive to degradation by o agents due to having tertiary carbon in its chain. Chlorine-based disinfectants, used to disinfect drinking water, cause the degradation of hot water pipes made of polypropylene random copolymer. The stability of polypropylene against oxidizing chemical agents depends on the type of crystalline phase and polymer morphology. This research investigated the effect of alpha, beta, and gamma crystalline phases and spherulite size on random polypropylene copolymer's chemical stability in chlorine dioxide. Three samples were prepared,... 

Developing an efficient visible-light-driven photocatalyst is believed to be a practical solution for clean energy and environmental remediation. The present study aimed to broaden current knowledge of the graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4)-based plasmonic photocatalysts by decorating polydopamine-grafted g-C3N4 (PDA/g-C3N4) with silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). The ternary nanocomposite was prepared using a facile synthesis method, while XPS and electron microscopy measurements confirmed the homogenous dispersion of AgNPs on PDA/g-C3N4. It was revealed that AgNPs successfully reduced the recombination rate of photoinduced electron-hole charge carriers. The calculated bandgap energy was... 

The N-doped rGO/NiFe2O4@Ti-doped ZnO as a novel ternary nanocomposite with magnetic recyclable was obtained by a facile and low-cost hydrothermal method. The structure, morphology, and optical as well as magnetic properties of synthesized nanocomposite were analyzed using the X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared spectra (FTIR), Raman spectroscopy, Emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM) with Energy dispersive spectra, Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), UV-vis diffusive reflectance spectra, and Vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM). The photocatalytic activity was determined by the degradation of Methylene blue (MB) and Methylene orange (MO) dyes under visible light... 

In this research, in order to overcome the limitations of the current wastewater treatment technologies, two types of green biocomposite, biocompatible, with high removal capacity for emerging pollutants from wastewater have been synthesized. The general steps of doing the work in this treatise for each category of biocomposite include green synthesis, processing and optimization of the synthesis method, structural characterization of the synthesized compounds, checking their performance to remove the model pollutant, investigating the effect of operational parameters on the removal efficiency, determining kinetics, isotherm and mechanism. And at the end was the assessment of biocomposite... 

Triclosan is widely used as an antibacterial agent in personal health care products, especially in recent years with the spread of the Coronavirus. This substance is one of the emerging contaminants, and due to its stable and toxic nature, this material cannot be destroyed in the process of biological wastewater treatment. In this research, a new bacterial strain was isolated and purified from industrial wastewater for the biological removal of triclosan. Based on 16S rRNA sequencing, it was found that the isolated strain belongs to the Enterobacter cloacae family and can grow in high concentrations of triclosan. It was observed that naphthalene dioxygenase and laccase enzymes are active... 

A triple photocatalytic composite of biochar, metal-organic framework and phosphomolybdic acid was prepared through solvothermal treatment of iron (III) chloride hexahydrate, terephthalic acid, lavandulifolia-derived biochar and phosphomolybdic acid. The composite was thoroughly characterized and utilized for photodegradation of organic dyes under visible light irradiation. Investigations of reaction variables confirmed that, the highest yield of 96.2% for a cationic Rhodamine-B (RhB) dye was achieved at ambient temperature when using 0.07 g of catalyst at pH of 7 and a dye concentration of 10 ppm. The activity of the composite was superior compared to its individual components implying... 

The susceptible light-harvesting and tremendous reduction capability along with the potentiality (photo)electrochemical merits of the thiospinels like CuCo2S4 (CCS) bring forth appreciably an advancement in efficacious photocatalytic reactions. However, scant oxidation potential originated from 3p orbitals of sulfur atoms puts a damper on their performance and is even conducive to self-oxidation. In this research, the surfactant/template free of hierarchical CCS thiospinels was synthesized using solvothermal sulfidation of the affordable glycerate-based CuCo-alkoxide and successfully was embedded with Z-scheme V2O5 deposited on wrinkled g-C3N4 lamella (VO-UCN) in the interest of developing...