The present work reports the performance of three types of polyethersulfone (PES) membrane in the removal of highly polluting and toxic lead Pb2+ and cadmium Cd2+ ions from a single salt. This study investigated the effect of operating variables, including pH, types of PES membrane, and feed concentration, on the separation process. The transport parameters and mass transfer coefficient (k) of the membranes were estimated using the combined film theory-solution-diffusion (CFSD), combined film theory-Spiegler-Kedem (CFSK), and combined film theory-finely-porous (CFFP) membrane transport models. Various parameters were used to estimate the enrichment factors, concentration polarization modulus, and Péclet number. The pH values significantly affected the permeation flux of the Pb2+ solution but only had a slight effect on the Cd2+ solution. However, Cd2+ rejection was highly improved by increasing the pH value. The rejection of the PES membranes increased greatly as the heavy metal concentration rose, while the heavy metal concentration moderately affected the permeation flux. The maximum rejection of Pb2+ in a single-salt solution was 99%, 97.5%, and 98% for a feed solution containing 10 mg Pb/L at pH 6, 6.2, and 5.7, for PES1, PES2, and PES3, respectively. The maximum rejection of Cd2+ in single-salt solutions was 78%, 50.2%, and 44% for a feed solution containing 10 mg Cd/L at pH 6.5, 6.2, and 6.5, for PES1, PES2, and PES3, respectively. The analysis of the experimental data using the CFSD, CFSK, and CFFP models showed a good agreement between the theoretical and experimental results. The effective membrane thickness and active skin layer thickness were evaluated using the CFFP model, indicating that the Péclet number is important for determining the mechanism of separation by diffusion.
Computer systems and networks are being used in almost every aspect of our daily life, the security threats to computers and networks have increased significantly. Usually, password-based user authentication is used to authenticate the legitimate user. However, this method has many gaps such as password sharing, brute force attack, dictionary attack and guessing. Keystroke dynamics is one of the famous and inexpensive behavioral biometric technologies, which authenticate a user based on the analysis of his/her typing rhythm. In this way, intrusion becomes more difficult because the password as well as the typing speed must match with the correct keystroke patterns. This thesis considers static keystroke dynamics as a transparent layer of t
... Show MoreMalaria is a curative disease, with therapeutics available for patients, such as drugs that can prevent future malaria infections in countries vulnerable to malaria. Though, there is no effective malaria vaccine until now, although it is an interesting research area in medicine. Local descriptors of blood smear image are exploited in this paper to solve parasitized malaria infection detection problem. Swarm intelligence is used to separate the red blood cells from the background of the blood slide image in adaptive manner. After that, the effective corner points are detected and localized using Harris corner detection method. Two types of local descriptors are generated from the local regions of the effective corners which are Gabor based f
... Show MoreThe process of accurate localization of the basic components of human faces (i.e., eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, etc.) from images is an important step in face processing techniques like face tracking, facial expression recognition or face recognition. However, it is a challenging task due to the variations in scale, orientation, pose, facial expressions, partial occlusions and lighting conditions. In the current paper, a scheme includes the method of three-hierarchal stages for facial components extraction is presented; it works regardless of illumination variance. Adaptive linear contrast enhancement methods like gamma correction and contrast stretching are used to simulate the variance in light condition among images. As testing material
... Show MoreIn this paper, an enhanced artificial potential field (EAPF) planner is introduced. This planner is proposed to rapidly find online solutions for the mobile robot path planning problems, when the underlying environment contains obstacles with unknown locations and sizes. The classical artificial potential field represents both the repulsive force due to the detected obstacle and the attractive force due to the target. These forces can be considered as the primary directional indicator for the mobile robot. However, the classical artificial potential field has many drawbacks. So, we suggest two secondary forces which are called the midpoint
... Show MoreWe propose a new object tracking model for two degrees of freedom mechanism. Our model uses a reverse projection from a camera plane to a world plane. Here, the model takes advantage of optic flow technique by re-projecting the flow vectors from the image space into world space. A pan-tilt (PT) mounting system is used to verify the performance of our model and maintain the tracked object within a region of interest (ROI). This system contains two servo motors to enable a webcam rotating along PT axes. The PT rotation angles are estimated based on a rigid transformation of the the optic flow vectors in which an idealized translation matrix followed by two rotational matrices around PT axes are used. Our model was tested and evaluated
... Show MoreTime series have gained great importance and have been applied in a manner in the economic, financial, health and social fields and used in the analysis through studying the changes and forecasting the future of the phenomenon. One of the most important models of the black box is the "ARMAX" model, which is a mixed model consisting of self-regression with moving averages with external inputs. It consists of several stages, namely determining the rank of the model and the process of estimating the parameters of the model and then the prediction process to know the amount of compensation granted to workers in the future in order to fulfil the future obligations of the Fund. , And using the regular least squares method and the frequ
... Show MoreA computational investigation is carried out in the field of charged particle optics with the aid of the numerical analysis methods. The work is concerned with the design of symmetrical double pole piece magnetic lens. The axial magnetic flux density distribution is determined by using exponential model, from which the paraxial-ray equation is solved to obtain the trajectory of particles that satisfy the suggested exponential model. From the knowledge of the first and second derivatives of axial potential distribution, the optical properties such as the focal length and aberration coefficients (radial distortion coefficient and spiral distortion coefficient) are determined. Finally, the pole piece profiles capable of pr
... Show MoreWhile analytical solutions to Quadratic Assignment Problems (QAP) have indeed been since a long time, the expanding use of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) for similar issues gives a framework for dealing with QAP with an extraordinarily broad scope. The study's key contribution is that it normalizes all of the criteria into a single scale, regardless of their measurement systems or the requirements of minimum or maximum, relieving the researchers of the exhaustively quantifying the quality criteria. A tabu search algorithm for quadratic assignment problems (TSQAP) is proposed, which combines the limitations of tabu search with a discrete assignment problem. The effectiveness of the proposed technique has been compared to well-established a
... Show MoreStress urinary incontinence (SUI) is involuntary urine leakage during activities that increase abdominal pressure such as coughing, sneezing and lifting of heavy weights. This is a very common disorder among women with history of multiple vaginal deliveries with an obstructed labor. SUI is considered one of the most distressing problems, especially for younger women, with severe quality of life implications, it caused by the loss of urethral support, usually as a consequence of the supporting structural muscles in the pelvis.
Objective: To prove and demonstrate the effect of a fractional CO2 micro-ablative laser (10600nm) in intra vaginal therapy for treating SUI and achieve a clinical improvement of t
... Show MoreThe aim of this paper is to design fast neural networks to approximate periodic functions, that is, design a fully connected networks contains links between all nodes in adjacent layers which can speed up the approximation times, reduce approximation failures, and increase possibility of obtaining the globally optimal approximation. We training suggested network by Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm then speeding suggested networks by choosing most activation function (transfer function) which having a very fast convergence rate for reasonable size networks. In all algorithms, the gradient of the performance function (energy function) is used to determine how to
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