Providing temporary shelter after major disasters is one of the major challenges for survivors and relief and reconstruction officials. In Iran, besides the distribution of tents, a common solution is to construct and deliver containers to the damaged areas. Following the 2017 earthquake in Kermanshah province, extensive damage was inflicted on urban and rural settlements, especially in the Dasht-e Zahab and Qasr-e-shirin districts. The high extent of the destruction, the proximity to the cold season, the rain, and the problems of living in emergency accommodation tents necessitated the acceleration of the provision of temporary housing and permanent shelter. The present article is a report of an action research project to find a different solution to this problem. Experience shows that accident survivors, especially in rural areas, provide shelter for their families by the locally available materials and technology, or the materials remained from the destroyed buildings. Aware of such a capacity, we tried to take a step towards providing temporary shelter by making maximum use of local materials and some non-local but inexpensive and affordable materials. For the first time, PVC pipes were used as the main structure of a temporary shelter. In the first phase, in December 2017, researchers visited the city of Sarpol-e Zahab and several villages in the region for six days in order to identify and evaluate the conditions of the region. Then, the design and execution of the first experimental sample of this structure called Kashaneh with dimensions of 2 × 3 meters was done in the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning of Shahid Beheshti University. During the execution, many points were identified and corrected, the strength of the structure was tested under gravity loading, and the structural calculations were performed using SAP2000 software. In the next step, the original sample with dimensions of 3 × 4 was built in the village of Kuik Aziz in the city of Sarpol-e Zahab. The willingness to participate among the residents and the positive feedback of the people towards the original sample indicated the success of this type of temporary shelter. Monitoring the samples, lower costs, speed of execution, participation of local labor force, ability to develop and attention to the psychological needs of the survivors in terms of similarity of the created space to a normal building, are among the advantages of this project.

In this research two major methods for production of synthetic papers based on polyvinyl chloride (PVC) was studied.The effect of stretching and extraction on films based on neat PVC and PVC/NBR (butadiene acrylonitrile rubber) blends to obtain paper-like cellulosic property was analyzed. In the extraction method, PVC and PVC/NBR blends in the stretching method only the PVC/NBR blend were used. Sugar was used as extractable filler with solvent (water) to produce 35-40 percent volume porosity measured by Archimedes methods. Also, it was shown that by decreasing sugar particle size, average pore size is reduced as well. It was also shown that temperature effect on permeation is greater than acid concentration. This paper like substrates for writing with pencil and pen were assessed fair to poor. In the second part the effects of temperature, rate and extent of stretching on the ink dispersion as a criterion of surface roughness or irregularity compared to cellulose paper were investigated. The results indicate a direct correlation of ink dispersion increase with increase in temperature and the degree of stretching. But the increase in stretching rate would result in lesser dispersion at constant temperature and stretching rate.

Production and consumption of plastic materials have increased in recent decades. The increase in plastic production and consumption has been largely responsible for the increase in plastics waste production. The problem of plastics waste is quite important in terms of environmental sustainability and solid waste management. Plastics recycling require the separation of materials insofar as being almost pure. To achieve this goal in an economical way, technologies developed in mineral processing are of great help. Each method has certain capabilities and limitations. Instance separation of PET and PVC by gravity techniques is practically not applicable, due to slight differences in density. In this research, separation of PET and PVC by selective floatation was studied. The use of floatation for plastic separation is particularly challenging because of inherent hydrophobic nature of plastics surfaces. To separate PET and PVC, from the mixture of the two, by floatation should make one of them hydrophilic and wettable by water. This can be achieved by several methods among which the addition of a wetting agent that interacts with the surface layer is one of many techniques designed. In this study, tannic acid was employed as the depressant of PET. The results showed that, virgin materials can be separated with 99.62% efficiency. In the case of post-consumer PET and PVC, 88.40% separation efficiency was achieved at optimum conditions. Also, in virgin and postconsumer materials, difference in the contact angles of PET and PVC increased as tannic acid dosage increased. Besides, the results indicated that the pH of the conditioning step is vital with respect to separation efficiency. 

PVC is one of the most important and widely used plastics in polymer industries. Blending is an effective method to improve the undesirable properties of PVC such as stiffness and brittleness. One of the most important blends of PVC is its mechanical mixing with nitrile rubber, but it should be reminded that despite of expensiveness, it has not desirable tear strength. In this work, SBR was added to the blend of PVC/NBR with the purpose to achieve better tear strength with lower cost. The effect of adding SBR and also mixing factors on mechanical properties of ternary blend were investigated using experimental design, i.e. Taguchi method. With the aid of replacing 7% by weight of NBR by SBR in PVC/NBR-SBR ternary blend the tear strength increased twice to the initial value.