Reducing Sugar Production from Durian Peel by Hydrochloric Acid Hydrolysis

Agricultural waste is mainly composed of cellulose and hemicelluloses which can be converted to sugars. The inexpensive reducing sugar from durian peel was obtained by hydrolysis with HCl concentration at 0.5-2.0% (v/v). The hydrolysis range of time was for 15-60 min when the mixture was autoclaved at 121 °C. The result showed that acid hydrolysis efficiency (AHE) highest to 80.99% at condition is 2.0%concentration for 15 min. Reducing sugar highest to 56.07 g/litre at condition is 2.0% concentration for 45min. Total sugar highest to 59.83 g/litre at condition is 2.0%concentration for 45min, which was not significant (p < 0.05) with condition 2.0% concentration for 30 min and 1.5 % concentration for 45 and 60 min. The increase in concentration increased AHE, reducing sugar and total sugar. The hydrolysis time had no effect on AHE, reducing sugar and total sugar. The maximum reducing sugars of each concentration were at hydrolysis time 45 min .The hydrolysated were analysis by HPLC, the results revealed that the principle of sugar were glucose, fructose and xylose.

The Knapsack Sharing Problem: A Tree Search Exact Algorithm

In this paper, we study the knapsack sharing problem, a variant of the well-known NP-Hard single knapsack problem. We investigate the use of a tree search for optimally solving the problem. The used method combines two complementary phases: a reduction interval search phase and a branch and bound procedure one. First, the reduction phase applies a polynomial reduction strategy; that is used for decomposing the problem into a series of knapsack problems. Second, the tree search procedure is applied in order to attain a set of optimal capacities characterizing the knapsack problems. Finally, the performance of the proposed optimal algorithm is evaluated on a set of instances of the literature and its runtime is compared to the best exact algorithm of the literature.

Level of Service Based Methodology for Municipal Infrastructure Management

Development of levels of service in municipal context is a flexible vehicle to assist in performing quality-cost trade-off analysis for municipal services. This trade-off depends on the willingness of a community to pay as well as on the condition of the assets. Community perspective of the performance of an asset from service point of view may be quite different from the municipality perspective of the performance of the same asset from condition point of view. This paper presents a three phased level of service based methodology for water mains that consists of :1)development of an Analytical Hierarchy model of level of service 2) development of Fuzzy Weighted Sum model of water main condition index and 3) deriving a Fuzzy logic based function that maps level of service to asset condition index. This mapping will assist asset managers in quantifying condition improvement requirement to meet service goals and to make more informed decisions on interventions and relayed priorities.

Iterative solutions to the linear matrix equation AXB + CXTD = E

In this paper the gradient based iterative algorithm is presented to solve the linear matrix equation AXB +CXTD = E, where X is unknown matrix, A,B,C,D,E are the given constant matrices. It is proved that if the equation has a solution, then the unique minimum norm solution can be obtained by choosing a special kind of initial matrices. Two numerical examples show that the introduced iterative algorithm is quite efficient.

Phase Behaviors and Fuel Properties of Bio-Oil-Diesel-Alcohol Blends

Attempt was made to improve certain characteristics of bio-oil derived from palm kernel pyrolysis by blending it with diesel fuel and alcohols. Two types of alcohol, ethanol or butanol, was used as cosolvent to stabilize the phase of ternary systems. Phase behaviors and basic fuel properties of palm kernel bio-oildiesel- alcohol systems were investigated in this study. Alcohol types showed a significant influence on the phase characteristics with palm kernel bio-oil-diesel-butanol system giving larger soluble area than that of palm kernel bio-oil-diesel-ethanol system. For fuel properties, blended fuels showed superior properties including lower values of density (~860 kg/m3 at 25°C), viscosity (~4.12 mm2/s at 40°C), carbon residue (1.02-2.53 wt%), ash (0.018-0.034 wt%) and pour point (

Production of the Protein-Vitamin Complex from Wheat Germ

Wheat germ has a balanced amino acid composition of the protein, which is well digested by enzymes in the gastrointestinal tract of humans, a high content of vitamins, minerals and unsaturated acids. Introduction components grain food products will enrich their biologically important substances, giving these products a number of valuable properties and reducing their caloric. A complex natural system of substances in foods will help replenish the body's need of essential nutrients, increasing its resistance to the harmful effects of the environment, prolong life. In this regard, there was a need for the development of production technology of protein complexes from wheat germ and then applying them in food, particularly in the dairy industry. Experimental studies were conducted to determine the number of herbal supplements on the sensory characteristics of the product. Studies have been conducted to determine the optimal process parameters of water activity and moisture content of the investigational product. 

Investigation of Growth Parameters of Soybean Cultivars in Different Weeding Regimes

In a field experiment, growth parameters of soybean cultivars in different weeding regimes was investigated. The trial was split plot in a randomized complete block design. The four cultivars and two lines of soybean (Glycine max L.) including: Sahar, Hill, Sari, Telar, 032 and 033 in main plot and weeding regime consist of no weeding (control), one weeding (35 days after planting) and two weeding (35+20 days after planting) were randomized in sub plot. The results showed that during the growth season 033 had the highest dry matter in two weeding. In two weeding regime the dry matter decreased. ). In all weeding regimes 033 had the highest CGR (Figs. 3a, 3b and 3c), which cleared this cultivar ability compare to the others. This cultivar by increasing its leaf area could do more photosynthesis, so, have a higher CGR.

A Comparative Study on Survival and Growth of Larvivorous Fish, Rasbora daniconius, Puntius ticto, and Puntius Conchonius

Experiments were carried out on the survival and growth of Rasbora daniconius, Puntius ticto and Puntius conchonius. The motivation of the study was to obtain information for growing the fish on a commercial scale for their use as biological control agents against mosquito larvae. The effects of temperature, total hardness, DO, pH and feed on the growth of fish were also investigated. Excessive value of total hardness was found because very rich calcium ion is present in Chitrakoot area. There was significant increases in growth rates of fish as temperature was increased from 280C to 300C. Further increases in temperature up to 320C, did not further affect growth. The positive and highly significant correlations 0.991488, 0.9581 and 0.9935 were found between length and weight of P. ticto, P. conchonius and R. daniconius respectively. The regression was significant at 5% level of probability.

Overriding Moral Intuitions – Does It Make Us Immoral? Dual-Process Theory of Higher Cognition Account for Moral Reasoning

Moral decisions are considered as an intuitive process, while conscious reasoning is mostly used only to justify those intuitions. This problem is described in few different dual-process theories of mind, that are being developed e.g. by Frederick and Kahneman, Stanovich and Evans. Those theories recently evolved into tri-process theories with a proposed process that makes ultimate decision or allows to paraformal processing with focal bias.. Presented experiment compares the decision patterns to the implications of those models. In presented study participants (n=179) considered different aspects of trolley dilemma or its footbridge version and decided after that. Results show that in the control group 70% of people decided to use the lever to change tracks for the running trolley, and 20% chose to push the fat man down the tracks. In contrast, after experimental manipulation almost no one decided to act. Also the decision time difference between dilemmas disappeared after experimental manipulation. The result supports the idea of three co-working processes: intuitive (TASS), paraformal (reflective mind) and algorithmic process.

A Novel Approach for Tracking of a Mobile Node Based on Particle Filter and Trilateration

This paper evaluates the performance of a novel algorithm for tracking of a mobile node, interms of execution time and root mean square error (RMSE). Particle Filter algorithm is used to track the mobile node, however a new technique in particle filter algorithm is also proposed to reduce the execution time. The stationary points were calculated through trilateration and finally by averaging the number of points collected for a specific time, whereas tracking is done through trilateration as well as particle filter algorithm. Wi-Fi signal is used to get initial guess of the position of mobile node in x-y coordinates system. Commercially available software “Wireless Mon" was used to read the WiFi signal strength from the WiFi card. Visual Cµ version 6 was used to interact with this software to read only the required data from the log-file generated by “Wireless Mon" software. Results are evaluated through mathematical modeling and MATLAB simulation.

Numerical Studies on Flow Field Characteristics of Cavity Based Scramjet Combustors

The flow field within the combustor of scramjet engine is very complex and poses a considerable challenge in the design and development of a supersonic combustor with an optimized geometry. In this paper comprehensive numerical studies on flow field characteristics of different cavity based scramjet combustors with transverse injection of hydrogen have been carried out for both non-reacting and reacting flows. The numerical studies have been carried out using a validated 2D unsteady, density based 1st-order implicit k-omega turbulence model with multi-component finite rate reacting species. The results show a wide variety of flow features resulting from the interactions between the injector flows, shock waves, boundary layers, and cavity flows. We conjectured that an optimized cavity is a good choice to stabilize the flame in the hypersonic flow, and it generates a recirculation zone in the scramjet combustor. We comprehended that the cavity based scramjet combustors having a bearing on the source of disturbance for the transverse jet oscillation, fuel/air mixing enhancement, and flameholding improvement. We concluded that cavity shape with backward facing step and 45o forward ramp is a good choice to get higher temperatures at the exit compared to other four models of scramjet combustors considered in this study.

Evaluation of Classifiers Based On I2C Distance for Action Recognition

Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbor (NBNN) and its variants, i,e., local NBNN and the NBNN kernels, are local feature-based classifiers that have achieved impressive performance in image classification. By exploiting instance-to-class (I2C) distances (instance means image/video in image/video classification), they avoid quantization errors of local image descriptors in the bag of words (BoW) model. However, the performances of NBNN, local NBNN and the NBNN kernels have not been validated on video analysis. In this paper, we introduce these three classifiers into human action recognition and conduct comprehensive experiments on the benchmark KTH and the realistic HMDB datasets. The results shows that those I2C based classifiers consistently outperform the SVM classifier with the BoW model.

Development of Decision Support System for House Evaluation and Purchasing

Home is important for Chinese people. Because the information regarding the house attributes and surrounding environments is incomplete in most real estate agency, most house buyers are difficult to consider the overall factors effectively and only can search candidates by sorting-based approach. This study aims to develop a decision support system for housing purchasing, in which surrounding facilities of each house are quantified. Then, all considered house factors and customer preferences are incorporated into Simple Multi-Attribute Ranking Technique (SMART) to support the housing evaluation. To evaluate the validity of proposed approach, an empirical study was conducted from a real estate agency. Based on the customer requirement and preferences, the proposed approach can identify better candidate house with consider the overall house attributes and surrounding facilities.

On the Prediction of Transmembrane Helical Segments in Membrane Proteins

The prediction of transmembrane helical segments (TMHs) in membrane proteins is an important field in the bioinformatics research. In this paper, a method based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has been developed to predict the number and location of TMHs in membrane proteins. PDB coded as 1F88 was chosen as an example to describe the prediction of the number and location of TMHs in membrane proteins by using this method. One group of test data sets that contain total 19 protein sequences was utilized to access the effect of this method. Compared with the prediction results of DAS, PRED-TMR2, SOSUI, HMMTOP2.0 and TMHMM2.0, the obtained results indicate that the presented method has higher prediction accuracy.

A Keyword-Based Filtering Technique of Document-Centric XML using NFA Representation

XML is becoming a de facto standard for online data exchange. Existing XML filtering techniques based on a publish/subscribe model are focused on the highly structured data marked up with XML tags. These techniques are efficient in filtering the documents of data-centric XML but are not effective in filtering the element contents of the document-centric XML. In this paper, we propose an extended XPath specification which includes a special matching character '%' used in the LIKE operation of SQL in order to solve the difficulty of writing some queries to adequately filter element contents using the previous XPath specification. We also present a novel technique for filtering a collection of document-centric XMLs, called Pfilter, which is able to exploit the extended XPath specification. We show several performance studies, efficiency and scalability using the multi-query processing time (MQPT).

Human Pose Estimation using Active Shape Models

Human pose estimation can be executed using Active Shape Models. The existing techniques for applying to human-body research using Active Shape Models, such as human detection, primarily take the form of silhouette of human body. This technique is not able to estimate accurately for human pose to concern two arms and legs, as the silhouette of human body represents the shape as out of round. To solve this problem, we applied the human body model as stick-figure, “skeleton". The skeleton model of human body can give consideration to various shapes of human pose. To obtain effective estimation result, we applied background subtraction and deformed matching algorithm of primary Active Shape Models in the fitting process. The images which were used to make the model were 600 human bodies, and the model has 17 landmark points which indicate body junction and key features of human pose. The maximum iteration for the fitting process was 30 times and the execution time was less than .03 sec.

The Effect of Cyclone Shape and Dust Collector on Gas-Solid Flow and Performance

Numerical analysis of flow characteristics and separation efficiency in a high-efficiency cyclone has been performed. Several models based on the experimental observation for a design purpose were proposed. However, the model is only estimated the cyclone's performance under the limited environments; it is difficult to obtain a general model for all types of cyclones. The purpose of this study is to find out the flow characteristics and separation efficiency numerically. The Reynolds stress model (RSM) was employed instead of a standard k-ε or a k-ω model which was suitable for isotropic turbulence and it could predict the pressure drop and the Rankine vortex very well. For small particles, there were three significant components (entrance of vortex finder, cone, and dust collector) for the particle separation. In the present work, the particle re-entraining phenomenon from the dust collector to the cyclone body was observed after considerable time. This re-entrainment degraded the separation efficiency and was one of the significant factors for the separation efficiency of the cyclone.

Effect of Chemical Pretreatments and Dehydration Methods on Quality Characteristics of Tomato Powder and Its Storage Stability

Dehydration process was carried out for tomato slices of var. Avinash after giving different pre-treatments such as calcium chloride (CaCl2), potassium metabisulphite (KMS), calcium chloride and potassium metabisulphite (CaCl2 +KMS), and sodium chloride (NaCl). Untreated samples served as control. Solar drier and continuous conveyor (tunnel) drier were used for dehydration. Quality characteristics of tomato slices viz. moisture content, sugar, titratable acidity, lycopene content, dehydration ratio, rehydration ratio and non-enzymatic browning as affected by dehydration process were studied. Storage study was also carried out for a period of six months for tomato powder packed into different types of packaging materials viz. metalized polyester (MP) film and low density poly ethylene (LDPE). Changes in lycopene content and non-enzymatic browning (NEB) were estimated during storage at room temperature. Pretreatment of 5 mm thickness of tomato slices with calcium chloride in combination with potassium metabisulphite and drying using a tunnel drier with subsequent storage of product in metalized polyester bags was selected as the best process.

A Survey on Voice over IP over Wireless LANs

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a form of voice communication that uses audio data to transmit voice signals to the end user. VoIP is one of the most important technologies in the World of communication. Around, 20 years of research on VoIP, some problems of VoIP are still remaining. During the past decade and with growing of wireless technologies, we have seen that many papers turn their concentration from Wired-LAN to Wireless-LAN. VoIP over Wireless LAN (WLAN) faces many challenges due to the loose nature of wireless network. Issues like providing Quality of Service (QoS) at a good level, dedicating capacity for calls and having secure calls is more difficult rather than wired LAN. Therefore VoIP over WLAN (VoWLAN) remains a challenging research topic. In this paper we consolidate and address major VoWLAN issues. This research is helpful for those researchers wants to do research in Voice over IP technology over WLAN network.

A Behavior Model of Discrete Sampling and Hold Amplifier based on AC Response

A kind of behavior model for discrete sampling and hold amplifier with charge transmission is analyzed. The transfer function and behavior features are based on the main AC responses of operation amplifier. The result used in pipelined and sigma-delta ADC shows the exact of model of sampling and hold amplifier, and the non-ideal factors are taken into account.