119 research outputs found

    Determinants of Early Marriage from Married Girls' Perspectives in Iranian Setting: A Qualitative Study

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    Early marriage is a worldwide problem associated with a range of health and social consequences for teenage girls. Designing effective health interventions for managing early marriage needs to apply the community-based approaches. However, it has received less attention from policymakers and health researchers in Iran. Therefore, the current study aimed to explore determinants of early marriage from married girls' perspectives. The study was conducted from May 2013 to January 2015 in Ahvaz, Iran. A purposeful sampling method was used to select fifteen eligible participants. Data were collected through face-to-face, semistructured interviews and were analyzed using the conventional content analysis approach. Three categories emerged from the qualitative data including "family structure," "Low autonomy in decision-making," and "response to needs." According to the results, although the participants were not ready to get married and intended to postpone their marriage, multiple factors such as individual and contextual factors propelled them to early marriage. Given that early marriage is a multifactorial problem, health care providers should consider a multidimensional approach to support and empower these vulnerable girls. � 2016 Simin Montazeri et al

    Dean flow-coupled inertial focusing in curved channels

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    Passive particle focusing based on inertial microfluidics was recently introduced as a high-throughput alternative to active focusing methods that require an external force field to manipulate particles. In inertial microfluidics, dominant inertial forces cause particles to move across streamlines and occupy equilibrium positions along the faces of walls in flows through straight micro channels. In this study, we systematically analyzed the addition of secondary Dean forces by introducing curvature and show how randomly distributed particles entering a simple u-shaped curved channel are focused to a fixed lateral position exiting the curvature. We found the lateral particle focusing position to be fixed and largely independent of radius of curvature and whether particles entering the curvature are pre-focused (at equilibrium) or randomly distributed. Unlike focusing in straight channels, where focusing typically is limited to channel cross-sections in the range of particle size to create single focusing point, we report here particle focusing in a large cross-section area (channel aspect ratio 1: 10). Furthermore, we describe a simple u-shaped curved channel, with single inlet and four outlets, for filtration applications. We demonstrate continuous focusing and filtration of 10 mu m particles (with > 90% filtration efficiency) from a suspension mixture at throughputs several orders of magnitude higher than flow through straight channels (volume flow rate of 4.25ml/min). Finally, as an example of high throughput cell processing application, white blood cells were continuously processed with a filtration efficiency of 78% with maintained high viability. We expect the study will aid in the fundamental understanding of flow through curved channels and open the door for the development of a whole set of bio-analytical applications

    Size and shape evolution of embedded single-crystal αα-Fe nanowires

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    The size and shape evolution of embedded ferromagnetic αα-Fe nanowires is discussed. The αα-Fe nanowires are formed by pulsed-laser deposition of La0.5Sr0.5FeO3−xLa0.5Sr0.5FeO3−x on single-crystal SrTiO3SrTiO3 (001) substrate in reducing atmosphere. The average diameter of the nanowires increases from d ≈ 4d≈4 to 50 nm as the growth temperature increases from T = 560T=560 to 840 °C. Their in-plane shape evolves from circular to octahedral and square shape with [110] facets dominating as the growth temperature increases. A fitting to a theoretical calculation shows that the circular shape is stable when the diameter of the nanowires is smaller than 8 nm.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87835/2/203110_1.pd

    Modelling Temperature Variation of Mushroom Growing Hall Using Artificial Neural Networks

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    The recent developments of computer and electronic systems have made the use of intelligent systems for the automation of agricultural industries. In this study, the temperature variation of the mushroom growing room was modeled by multi-layered perceptron and radial basis function networks based on independent parameters including ambient temperature, water temperature, fresh air and circulation air dampers, and water tap. According to the obtained results from the networks, the best network for MLP was in the second repetition with 12 neurons in the hidden layer and in 20 neurons in the hidden layer for radial basis function network. The obtained results from comparative parameters for two networks showed the highest correlation coefficient (0.966), the lowest root mean square error (RMSE) (0.787) and the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) (0.02746) for radial basis function. Therefore, the neural network with radial basis function was selected as a predictor of the behavior of the system for the temperature of mushroom growing halls controlling system

    Optimization of performance and emission of compression ignition engine fueled with propylene glycol and biodiesel–diesel blends using artificialintelligence method of ANN-GA-RSM

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    The present study proposes the hybrid machine learning algorithm of artificial neural network-genetic algorithm-response surface methodology (ANN-GA-RSM) to modelthe performance and the emissionsof a single cylinder diesel engine fueled by diesel and propylene glycol additive. The evaluations areperformed using the correlation coefficient (CC), and the root mean square error (RMSE) values. The best model for prediction of the dependent variables is reported ANN-GA with the RMSE values of 0.0398, 0.0368, 0.0529, 0.0354, 0.0509 and 0.0409 and CC 0.988, 0.987, 0.977, 0.994, 0.984, 0.990, respectively for brake specific fuel consumption (BSFC), brake thermal efficiency (BTE), CO, CO2, NOx and SO2. The proposed hybrid model reduces BSFC, NOx, and CO by −30.82%, 21.32%, and 11.32%, respectively. The model also increases the engine efficiency and CO2 emission by 17.29% and 31.05%, respectively, compared to a single RSM in the optimized level of independent variables (69% of biodiesel's oxygen content and 32% of the oxygen content of propylene glycol)
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