---

This paper discusses the number of scholars and their scientific interests in the reign of Bu-veyhid. Buveyhid the most important Iranian-Shi ‘it dynasties appeared in the early era of Islam. They were so powerful that the Abbasid Caliphs had to obey them. According to their Shi ‘it religion, they practiced the idea of democracy and all sects were free in their reign. According to the survey more than 350 scholars were prominent in this period, during 320/900- 450/1050. If we count their specialty, the number increases to about 714. What is in-teresting is that we can find all fields specialists at that time. They are from all religions and also Islamic sects. The number of Shi ‘it scholars is outstanding among them.

---

Shape memory alloys are a category of smart materials which exhibit large deformations under temperature or magnetic stimuli due to micromechanical changes. These alloys offer a good potential in design of control systems, sensors and actuators due to two main effects called shape memory effect and superelastic effect. Main advantages of these systems are their small scale, low weight, low activation power, long life and high power to weight ratio. On the other hand, the main disadvantage of thermal ones is their low actuation frequency. In this work, inspired by human arm muscles, a new actuator is designed and its actuation time is minimized utilizing the thermoelectric effect. The process requires simultaneous analysis of heat transfer, constitutive equations, phase transformation and also the dynamic equations of the actuator. The dynamic response of the designed actuator is compared with the similar experimental data available in the literature and finally it is shown that, the actuation time of the proposed actuator can be reduced at least 50% thanks to the Peltier effect.

---

Drying is one of the ways of storing of persimmon. In this study, to increasing shelf life of persimmon and producing high-quality products, infrared dryer was used and mass transfer kinetics, density, rehydration and color of samples were measured. The results showed that radiation lamp power and distance of lamp from sample had significant effect on the moisture loss kinetics and drying time (P<0.05). With increasing in radiation power, as well as reducing the distance of samples from the source of radiation, drying time decreased. The average density and rehydration for the dried samples in infrared were 639 kg /m³  and 270 %, respectively. The average calculated color changes (ΔE) for the power of 200, 300 and 400 w were 14.43, 10.09 and 20.04, respectively. The results of modeling by genetic algorithm-artificial neural network showed that artificial neural network combined with genetic algorithm provides better results and with combine them the speed of analysis and accuracy of modeling process increases. Using a network with 15 neurons in the hidden layer and using the hyperbolic tangent activation function and percentage data used to training/validation/testing equal 20/20/60 may be predicted drying kinetics of persimmon.