Iran and the US

Arsalan Ghorbani Sheikhneshin 서울대학교 국제학연구소 2009 Journal of International and Area Studies Vol.16 No.1

Iran-US relations have been poor since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. All efforts to improve the relations have been frustrated. A rapprochement seems highly unlikely, especially, due to the Iranian nuclear program. Tehran has rejected such accusations and emphasized that their nuclear program is intended for civilian purposes. This paper examines the main claims and counter claims between Iran and the US, especially over terrorism-related issues. It argues that the US should revise its foreign policy, from aggressive and arrogant tactics to a policy of engagement and face-to-face negotiations. This paper emphasizes that the continuations of hard line policies, such as sanctions and war, against Iran would be counterproductive and will throw the whole region in turmoil.

Source rock potential of the Early Cretaceous intervals in the Darquain field, Abadan Plain, Zagros Basin, SW Iran

Arsalan Zeinalzadeh,Reza Moussavi-Harami,Asadollah Mahboubi,Vali Ahmad Sajjadian 한국지질과학협의회 2018 Geosciences Journal Vol.22 No.4

The Darquain field is located in the Abadan Plain SW Iran, which has a high potential for exploration and production of hydrocarbon resources with poorly defined petroleum systems. The goal of this paper is to characterize the Cretaceous source rock potential in the Darquain field. A gamma-sonic log was used as a proxy to identify probable source rock zones and to select sample depths. A total of 37 samples were analyzed by Rock-Eval, elemental, Gas Chromatography (GC) and gas chromatographymass spectrometry (GC-MS) techniques. The petroleum generation potential, as well as origin of the organic matter of samples, have been investigated. The results of this study indicate that, in the Early Cretaceous successions, there are favorable source zones in Garau, Gadvan, and Kazhdumi Formations. These source zones predominantly contain organic matter from marine origin, suggesting kerogen type II, while some samples contain terrestrial organic matters, suggesting kerogen type III. The Lower Garau zone, with 1.14 to 14.29% total organic carbon (TOC), is an excellent source rock with a fair genetic potential in the range of 2.74 and 9.5 mg/g. Elemental analysis results in the Lower Garau zone allow the classification of kerogens as high-sulfur. There are very good source zones in the Kazhdumi Formation, with fair to good genetic potential. The results of Rock-Eval and petrophysical analyses show that gamma ray data can be used as a useful tool to determine the potential source zones, although where TOC is less than 1% there is inconsistency. The results obtained from the biomarker characteristics are in agreement with the results of Rock-Eval pyrolysis and indicated carbonate source rocks, which contain a mixture of marine organic matter with a minor amount of terrigenous organic matter. Biomarker characteristics also suggest that the organic matter was deposited in a marine environment under reducing conditions, and that Early Cretaceous source zones are at the stage of early oil window to peak of oil generation.

A 3 kW Bidirectional DC-DC Converter for Electric Vehicles

Arsalan Ansari,Puyang Cheng,Hee-Jun Kim 대한전기학회 2016 Journal of Electrical Engineering & Technology Vol.11 No.4

A bidirectional DC-DC converter (BDC) is an indispensable electrical unit for the electric vehicles (EVs). High efficiency, high power density, isolation, light weight and reliability are all essential requirements for BDC. In this paper, a 3 kW BDC for the battery charger of EVs is proposed. The proposed converter consists of a half-bridge structure on the primary side and an isolation transformer and a synchronous rectifier structure on the secondary side. With this topology, minimum number of switching devices are required for bidirectional power flow between the two dc buses of EVs. The easy implementation of the synchronous rectification gives advantages in terms of efficiency, cost and flexibility. The proposed BDC achieves high efficiency when operating in both modes (step-up and step-down). A 3 kW prototype is implemented to verify theoretical analysis and the performance of the proposed converter.

Determining the Relationship between the Effective Factors of Strategic Behavior: A Case Study for Social Insurance Company of Tehran

Arsalan Kazemi,Habibollah Javanmard,Ramona Mohammadi 한국유통과학회 2017 Asian Journal of Business Environment (AJBE) Vol.7 No.1

Purpose - In order to achieve the organizational objectives, the behavior of the employees and their collaboration with management should be taken into account. It has been shown that strategic behavior depends on a number of different factors. The aim of this article was determining the relationship between factors related to the strategic behavior. Research design, data, and methodology - Accordingly, a conceptual model was developed and tested in the form of a survey. Participants of the study were the employees working in the social Insurance company of Tehran. Data was collected using a questionnaire conducted among managers and the staff. A correlation model was used for data analysis by employing the SPSS software. Results - The findings showed there was a relationship between employees’ engagement and the strategic behavior. Conclusions - Our research has demonstrated the effect of employees’ engagement on the strategic-driven behavior, emphasizing the role of employees’ engagement in health-care service firms. Although previous service research has focused on the factors that drive employees’ performance, it seems that most of this research has been inspired by the idea of the service profit chain, focusing on the effect of employees’ satisfaction on performance.

Optimizing Fleet Composition and Routing Plan Scheduling for Offshore Supply Operations: Case Study of an Offshore Drilling Firm

Arsalan ALEHASHEMI,Siamak HAJIYAKHCHALI 한국해운물류학회 2018 The Asian journal of shipping and Logistics Vol.34 No.3

Supplying offshore facilities with their demands in specific timeframes can be a costly operation given the environment, scale of demands and other real-world constraints. Scope of this work provides offshore supply operators with a model to reach an optimum fleet of vessels and a schedule of routes for each vessel to be repeated periodically. The nature of the problem with two depots, each of the two providing different supplies in addition to loading and unloading constraints both at depots and rigs, maintenance mandates, safety issues and mitigation of operational risks adds to the problem's level of complexity. In this paper a novel three-phased approach towards the problem is discussed and as results, optimum fleet of supply vessels and their respective routes are proposed regarding all considered constraints, dealing with the multi-commodity nature of the problem as well.

A Simplified SVPWM for Three Level Inverters to Eliminate Leakage Currents in Transformeless Photovoltaic Systems

Arsalan Ansari(아르살란 안살리),Hee-Jun Kim(김희준) 대한전기학회 2016 전기학회논문지 Vol.65 No.2

This paper proposes a simplified SVPWM for three level inverters in transformerless photovoltaic (PV) systems. With the proposed SVPWM the three level space vector (SV) diagram is divided into only six sectors as in conventional two level SV diagram in such a way that only seven SVs are used among all the available SVs of three level inverter. The main features of the proposed SVPWM are that it is simple to implement, less switching losses as compared to conventional SVPWM and most importantly it eliminates the leakage currents in transformerless PV systems. Detailed theoretical analysis of the proposed SVPWM are presented and verified by numerical simulations and experimental results.

FRED-Net: Fully residual encoder–decoder network for accurate iris segmentation

Arsalan, Muhammad,Kim, Dong Seop,Lee, Min Beom,Owais, Muhammad,Park, Kang Ryoung Elsevier 2019 expert systems with applications Vol.122 No.-

<P><B>Abstract</B></P> <P>Iris recognition is now developed enough to recognize a person from a distance. The process of iris segmentation plays a vital role in maintaining the accuracy of the iris-based recognition systems by limiting the errors at the current stage. However, its performance is affected by non-ideal situations created by environmental light noise and user non-cooperation. The existing local feature-based segmentation methods are unable to find the true iris boundary in these non-ideal situations, and the error created at the segmentation stage traverses to all the subsequent stages, which results in reduced accuracy and reliability. In addition, it is necessary to segment the true iris boundary without the extra cost of denoising as preprocessing. To overcome these challenging issues during iris segmentation, a deep learning-based fully residual encoder–decoder network (FRED-Net) is proposed to determine the true iris region with the flow of high-frequency information from the preceding layers via residual skip connection.</P> <P>The main four impacts and significances of this study are as follows. First, FRED-Net is an end-to-end semantic segmentation network that does not use conventional image processing schemes, and does not have a preprocessing overhead. It is a standalone network in which eyelid, eyelash, and glint detections are not required to obtain the true iris boundary. Second, the proposed FRED-Net is the final resultant structure of a step-by-step development, and in each step, a new complete variant network is created for semantic segmentation considering the detailed descriptions of the networks. Third, FRED-Net uses the residual connectivity between convolutional layers by the residual shortcut for both encoder and decoder, which enables a high-frequency component to flow through the network and achieve higher accuracy with few layers. Fourth, the performance of the proposed FRED-Net is tested with five different iris datasets under visible and NIR light environments, and two general road scene segmentation datasets. To achieve fair comparisons with other studies, our trained FRED-Net models, along with the algorithms, are made publicly available through our website (Dongguk FRED-Net Model with Algorithm. accessed on 16 May 2018).</P> <P>The experiments include two datasets: Noisy Iris Challenge Evaluation – Part II (NICE-II) selected from the UBIRIS.v2 database and Mobile Iris Challenge Evaluation (MICHE-I), for the visible light environment and three datasets: Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) v4.0 interval, v4.0 distance, and IIT Delhi v1.0, for the near-infrared (NIR) light environment. Moreover, to evaluate the performance of the proposed network in general segmentation, experiments with two famous road scene segmentation datasets: Cambridge-driving Labeled Video Database (CamVid) and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (KITTI), are included. The experimental results showed the optimum performance of the proposed FRED-Net on the above-mentioned seven datasets of iris and general road scene segmentation.</P> <P><B>Hightlights</B></P> <P> <UL> <LI> Proposed FRED-Net is an end-to-end semantic segmentation network for iris and road scene. </LI> <LI> FRED-Net is a standalone network where eyelid, eyelash, and glint detections are not required. </LI> <LI> FRED-Net is the result of step-by-step development, whose step is a complete variant network. </LI> <LI> FRED-Net uses the residual connectivity for both encoder and decoder. </LI> <LI> Our trained FRED-Net models, along with the algorithms, are made publicly available. </LI> </UL> </P>

Optimal stiffness distribution in preliminary design of tubed-system tall buildings

Arsalan Alavi,Reza Rahgozar 국제구조공학회 2018 Structural Engineering and Mechanics, An Int'l Jou Vol.65 No.6

This paper presents an optimal pattern for distributing stiffness along a framed tube structure through an analytic equation, which may be used during the preliminary design stage. Most studies in this field are computationally intensive and time consuming, while a hand-calculation method, as presented here, is a more suitable tool for sensitivity analyses and parametric studies. Approach in development of the analytic model is to minimize the mean compliance (external work) for a given volume of material. A variational statement of the problem is made, and a specified deformation-profile is obtained as the necessary condition for a minimum; enforcing this condition, stiffness is then computed. Due to some near-zero values for stiffness, the problem is modified by considering a lower bound constraint. To deal with this constraint, the design domain is assumed to be divided into two zones of constant stiffness and constant curvature; and the problem is restated in terms of these concepts. It will be shown that this methodology allows for easy computation of stiffness through an analytic and dimensionless equation, valid in any system of units. To show practicality of the proposed method, a tubed-system structure with uniform stiffness distribution is redesigned using the proposed model. Comparative analyses of the results reveal that in addition to simplicity of the proposed method, it provides a rather high degree of accuracy for real-world problems.

Analysis of a Novel DC-DC Converter with High Conversion Ratio

Arsalan Ansari,Hee-Jun Kim,Gyung-Seok Han 대한전기학회 2013 대한전기학회 학술대회 논문집 Vol.2013 No.10

Evaluation of folic acid-conjugated chitosan grafted Fe3O4/graphene oxide as a pH- and magnetic field-responsive system for adsorption and controlled release of gemcitabine

Arsalan Ashuri,Mahsasadat Miralinaghi,Elham Moniri 한국화학공학회 2022 Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering Vol.39 No.7

A pH-responsive system was prepared by using a magnetic nanocomposite, folic acid-conjugated chitosan(FA-CS) grafted Fe3O4/GO, and then used for loading and controlled release of an anti-cancer drug, gemcitabine (GEM). The successful synthesis of FA-CS/Fe3O4/GO was confirmed by various characterization techniques such as FE-SEM/EDX, TEM, FT-IR, XRD, TGA, VSM, and BET. The nanocomposite had a mesoporous structure with the specific surfacearea of 68.96m2 g1, the pore volume of 0.25 cm3 g1, and the mean pore size of 14.78 nm. The optimum conditionsfor drug loading through adsorption were found to be pH=4, adsorbent dosage of 0.5 g L1, temperature of298 K, and contact time of 45 min. Experimental data indicated that GEM adsorption onto FA-CS/Fe3O4/GO has a satisfactorycorrelation with the pseudo-second-order kinetic and Freundlich isotherm equations. The maximum adsorptioncapacity of GEM was 221.17mg g1 for FA-CS/Fe3O4/GO, which was quite higher than the non-functionalizedFe3O4/GO with the value of 33.99mg g1. Furthermore, the in-vitro drug release profile of GEM from drug-loaded FACS/Fe3O4/GO was studied within 48 hours at 37 oC, and the results indicated a higher drug cumulative release amountin simulated cancer fluid (pH 5.6) compared to simulated human blood fluid (pH 7.4). Also, the Peppas-Sahlin kineticmodel best fitted the release kinetics data. The result of drug release implied that FA-CS/Fe3O4/GO magnetic biocompositecould be a potential carrier for the sustained and controlled release of GEM.