A new durable antibacterial cotton fabric was successfully prepared by free-radical graft copolymerization of acrylic acid (AA) and itaconic acid (IA) onto a cotton fabric in an aqueous medium. Ammonium persulfate (APS) was used as the initiator in the presence of a crosslinker, methylene bisacrylamide (MBA). The nanocomposite hydrogel was obtained from in situ formation of silver nanoparticles from reduction of silver cations by sodium borohydride. A proposed mechanism for nanocomposite formation was suggested and the effect of ratio of IA to AA on water absorbency discussed. FTIR, UV-Vis, X-ray, and scanning electron microscopy were employed to characterize the structure of the prepared superabsorbent. The antibacterial activity of the hydrogel was tested qualitatively and quantitatively. Results showed that the silver nanoparticle-loaded fabric has potent antibacterial activity to Escherichia coli Gram-negative bacteria.

Outsourcing is a common practice among the organizations and it is a major element in business strategy. It has recognized as an area of strategic importance. This article represents the application of the DMAIC Six Sigma approach to improve outsourcing management process with an emphasis to reduce delay of delivery time for a manufacturing company. The paper identifies each stage of the DMAIC cycle and the Six Sigma tools that were applied. The improvement project has been implemented in seven months.

Over the past three decades, the unified approach of the optimization of the logistic systems has become one of the most important aspects of optimizing the supply chain so that in recent decades it has had a large application in practice and has been used to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the logistic fleet. The inter-urban transport networks by the terminals play an important role in logistic fleet and the goods distribution. In some cases, numbers of terminals face with an overload and others encounter with additional vehicles, which result delay in the load post and unnecessary car downtime. The present paper aims at modeling, scheduling and routing of the vehicles network and minimizing delays in order to create an optimal balance between the number of vehicles and the capacity of the car terminals to use the maximal capacity of vehicles. So that the multi-objective mathematical model is presented to quantify the regular transportation costs and to minimize the car downtime. The proposed model has two conflicting objectives where on tried to increase costs and the other decreases unused cars. Due to the high complexity of the problem, the multi-objective differential evolutionary algorithm (MODE) has been used. To prove the proposed algorithm, it has compared with the NSGA-II algorithm using four comparing indexes. The computational results show the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

In this study, for the first time we report a highly selective and sensitive lutetium ions chemical optical sensor based on immobilization of a asymmetrically S–N Schiff’s base, namely N-(thien-2-ylmethylene)pyridine-2,6-diamine (TPD) on a triacetylcellulose membrane. This optode exhibits a linear range of 5.0 ×10-7 –1.0 ×10-5 M of the Lu(III) ion concentration with a detection limit of 9.3 ×10-8 M at a wavelength of 336 nm. The influence of responsible factors for improving sensitivity of the sensor was studied and identified. Response time of the newly designed optode was within 20-30 s depending on the Lu(III) ion concentration. Response of the optical sensor is independent of the pH of the solution in the range of 3.0–9.0. It manifests advantages of fast response time, low detection limit and most significantly, very good selectivity with respect to a number of lanthanide ions. The sensor can readily be regenerated with thiourea solutions and its response was reversible and reproducible. This optode was applied to the determination of Lu(III) in aqueous and CRM samples.

In today’s competitive economy, quality plays an essential role for the success business units and there are considerable efforts made to control and to improve quality characteristics in order to satisfy customers’ requirements. However, improving quality is normally involved with various criteria and we need to use Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) to handle such cases. In this state-of the-art literature survey, 45 articles focused on solving quality problems by MCDM methods are investigated. These articles were published between 1994 and 2013.Seven areas were selected for categorization: (1) AHP, Fuzzy AHP, ANP and Fuzzy ANP, (2) DEMATEL and Fuzzy DEMATEL, (3) GRA, (4) Vikor and Fuzzy Vikor, (5) TOPSIS, Fuzzy TOPSIS and combination of TOPSIS and AHP, (6) Fuzzy and (7) Less frequent and hybrid procedures. According to our survey, Fuzzy based methods were the most popular technique with about 40% usage among procedures. Also AHP and ANP were almost 20% of functional methods. This survey ends with giving recommendation for future researches.

The political costs, bonuses paid to managers, how to use the growth opportunities obtained and their effects on the profitability of companies are the issues that have always been a major of corporations’ concerns. Company exposure to political decisions, its costs and effects on the company's cash flow is very important. Hence, understanding the relationship between variables in a company and how they influence on each other helps management decisions for better opportunities and reduction in political costs, increase cash flow and ultimately increase the profitability of the firms. This survey studies the relationship between the impact of political costs on companies with high free cash flow and low growth opportunity. In this survey, company's assets, sales, income and number of employees are estimated. Then the indexes related to these costs are evaluated based on the tax component, the cost of the sports, personnel costs and relationships among them. Pearson correlation coefficient, regression coefficients and analysis of variance have been used to examine the hypotheses of the survey. The results show that the political cost, high free cash flow and low growth opportunity had negative correlations with each other. In other words, there was a negative relationship between profit and political costs in companies with high free cash flow and low growth opportunity. Moreover, high free cash flow and low growth opportunities had significant effect on the relationship between political costs and benefits in companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange.

A crucial issue in humanitarian relief operations is vehicle routing because there are many difficulties in roads that people face when a disaster is occurred. In such circumstances, selecting more reliable routes could help rescue team act more efficacious. Therefore, we propose a mathematical model that maximizes the reliability of selected routes in disaster relief routing process using a multiple attribute decision making (MADM) technique. Furthermore, the proposed model minimizes the total cost that imposed to system. For this reason, the model is a multi-objective vehicle routing problem (VRP). The problem considered here is NP-hard and its objective is to find near optimal solutions, rather than optimal ones, using the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm.

Silicon/glass bi-materials are used in micro-assembly and packaging of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and micro-electronics devices. In this paper, maximum tangential stress (MTS) concept is used for determination of the fracture initiation angles of silicon/ glass bi-material notches. First, the MTS criterion is analytically formulated for a bi-material notch problem. Then, the criterion used for prediction of fracture initiation angles of some experimental data given in literature for silicon/ glass bi-material notches. In addition, the modified MTS (MMTS) criterion, which considers the effect of I-stress, was compared with the MTS criterion and the experimental data. It was shown that MMTS criterion provides more accurate results than the MTS criterion for estimation of the fracture initiation angle.

Ranking fuzzy numbers is one of the most important phases in any decision making process in fuzzy environments. In most cases, we deal with fuzzy numbers in the field of evaluating alternatives with fuzzy information or linguistic variables. This paper investigates ranking fuzzy numbers using the concept of preference ratio, introduces the weakness of this method, and proposes a new approach that overcomes the shortcoming of existing method. The proposed approach which is based on the concept of utility function takes the opinion of DM for ranking fuzzy numbers into account.

Stroke is one of the main causes of disability. It affects millions of people worldwide. One symptom of stroke is disabled arm function. Restoration of arm function is necessary to resuming activities of daily living (ADL). Along with traditional rehabilitation techniques, robot-aided therapy has emerged recently. The control schemes of rehabilitation robots are designed for two reasons. First they are designed for passive rehabilitation in which the robot guides the patient & apos; s limb through a predefined path and second for active rehabilitation in which the patient initiates the movement and is partially assisted or resisted by the robotic device. This paper introduces a new robot for shoulder rehabilitation. The Shoulder Rehabilitation System (SRS) has three degrees of freedom (DOFs) for three rotational DOFs of the shoulder but additional translational DOFs of the shoulder are also allowed to avoid discomfort to the patient. A new open circular mechanism is proposed for the third joint that solves the known issues for rehabilitation robots such as long wiring and discomfort associated with closed mechanisms. Lyapunov-based controller with integral action is proposed to guide the robot through a predefined trajectory. Simulation results proved that the proposed controller can track the desired trajectory; reject constant bounded disturbance to the system and is robust due to its nonlinear nature. The proposed controller is designed to be used in passive rehabilitation.