Antioxidant Properties of Sweet Cherries(Prunus avium L.) - Role of Phenolic Compounds

Sweet cherries (Prunus avium L.) contain various phenolic compounds which contribute to total antioxidant activity. Total polyphenols, tannins, flavonoids and anthocyanins, and antioxidant capacity in a fruits of a number of selected sweet cherry genotypes were investigated. Total polyphenols content ranged from 4.12 to 8.34 mg gallic acid equivantents/g dry fruit weight and total tannins content ranged from 0.19 to 1.95 mg gallic acid equivalent/g dry fruit weight. Total flavonoids were within the range 0.42-1.56 mg of rutin equivalents/g dry fruit weight and total anthocyanins content were between 0.35 and 0.69 mg cyanidin 3-glucoside equivalent/ g dry fruit weight. Although sweet cherry fruits are a significant source of different phenolic compounds, antioxidant activity of sweet cherries is not related only with the total polyphenolics, flavonoids or anthocyanins.

A Functional Beverage: Lemonade

Fruits and vegetables are the essentials of a healthy diet, mainly because of their antioxidant properties contributing to disease blockage especially for some certain types of cancer. Being a favourite fruit, citrus are produced for economic and commercial purposes worldwide. Particularly, lemon fruit (Citrus limon L.), has an important place in export products of Turkey. Lemon has a great importance on human nutrition with regard to being a source of nutrients, flavonoids, vitamin C and minerals. It is used for food flavouring and pickling and also processed for lemonade. By processing citrus into fruit juices, consumption may increase and also become easier. Like many fruits and vegetables lemons are cheap and abundant during harvesting period, while they are quite expensive in other seasons. Lemon juice and concentrate production allows consumers to get benefits from lemon fruit in any time of the year. Lemonade is getting in to the focus of consumers’ attention preferring non-carbonated drinks. The demand of healthy, convenient functional foods affects consumer trends through innovative products. For this reason, lemonade could be enriched with different natural herb extracts such as ginger (Zingiber officinale), linden (Tilia cordata), and mint (Mentha piperita).

An Empirical Model to Calculate the Threads Stripping of a Bolt Installed in a Tapped Part

To determine the length of engagement threads of a bolt installed in a tapped part in order to avoid the threads stripping remains a very current problem in the design of the thread assemblies. It does not exist a calculation method formalized for the cases where the bolt is screwed directly in a ductile material. In this article, we study the behavior of the threads stripping of a loaded assembly by using a modelling by finite elements and a rupture criterion by damage. This modelling enables us to study the different parameters likely to influence the behavior of this bolted connection. We study in particular, the influence of couple of materials constituting the connection, of the bolt-s diameter and the geometrical characteristics of the tapped part, like the external diameter and the length of engagement threads. We established an experiments design to know the most significant parameters. That enables us to propose a simple expression making possible to calculate the resistance of the threads whatever the metallic materials of the bolt and the tapped part. We carried out stripping tests in order to validate our model. The estimated results are very close to those obtained by the tests.

ANN-Based Classification of Indirect Immuno Fluorescence Images

In this paper we address the issue of classifying the fluorescent intensity of a sample in Indirect Immuno-Fluorescence (IIF). Since IIF is a subjective, semi-quantitative test in its very nature, we discuss a strategy to reliably label the image data set by using the diagnoses performed by different physicians. Then, we discuss image pre-processing, feature extraction and selection. Finally, we propose two ANN-based classifiers that can separate intrinsically dubious samples and whose error tolerance can be flexibly set. Measured performance shows error rates less than 1%, which candidates the method to be used in daily medical practice either to perform pre-selection of cases to be examined, or to act as a second reader.

Acoustic Analysis with Consideration of Damping Effects of Air Viscosity in Sound Pathway

Sound pathways in the enclosures of small earphones are very narrow. In such narrow pathways, the speed of sound propagation and the phase of sound waves change because of the air viscosity. We have developed a new finite element method that includes the effects of damping due to air viscosity for modeling the sound pathway. This method is developed as an extension of the existing finite element method for porous sound-absorbing materials. The numerical calculation results using the proposed finite element method are validated against the existing calculation methods.

Migration and Accumulation of Artificial Radionuclides in the System Water-Soil-Plants Depending on Polymers Applying

The possibility of radionuclides-related contamination of lands at agricultural holdings defines the necessity to apply special protective measures in plant growing. The aim of researches is to elucidate the influence of polymers applying on biological migration of man-made anthropogenic radionuclides 90Sr and 137Cs in the system water - soil – plant. The tests are being carried out under field conditions with and without application of polymers in root-inhabited media in more radioecological tension zone (with the radius of 7 km from the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant). The polymers on the base of K+, Caµ, KµCaµ ions were tested. Productivity of pepper depending on the presence and type of polymer material, content of artificial radionuclides in waters, soil and plant material has been determined. The character of different polymers influence on the artificial radionuclides migration and accumulation in the system water-soil-plant and accumulation in the plants has been cleared up.

Improving Co-integration Trading Rule Profitability with Forecasts from an Artificial Neural Network

Co-integration models the long-term, equilibrium relationship of two or more related financial variables. Even if cointegration is found, in the short run, there may be deviations from the long run equilibrium relationship. The aim of this work is to forecast these deviations using neural networks and create a trading strategy based on them. A case study is used: co-integration residuals from Australian Bank Bill futures are forecast and traded using various exogenous input variables combined with neural networks. The choice of the optimal exogenous input variables chosen for each neural network, undertaken in previous work [1], is validated by comparing the forecasts and corresponding profitability of each, using a trading strategy.

Condition Monitoring in the Management of Maintenance in a Large Scale Precision CNC Machining Manufacturing Facility

The manufacture of large-scale precision aerospace components using CNC requires a highly effective maintenance strategy to ensure that the required accuracy can be achieved over many hours of production. This paper reviews a strategy for a maintenance management system based on Failure Mode Avoidance, which uses advanced techniques and technologies to underpin a predictive maintenance strategy. It is shown how condition monitoring (CM) is important to predict potential failures in high precision machining facilities and achieve intelligent and integrated maintenance management. There are two distinct ways in which CM can be applied. One is to monitor key process parameters and observe trends which may indicate a gradual deterioration of accuracy in the product. The other is the use of CM techniques to monitor high status machine parameters enables trends to be observed which can be corrected before machine failure and downtime occurs. It is concluded that the key to developing a flexible and intelligent maintenance framework in any precision manufacturing operation is the ability to evaluate reliably and routinely machine tool condition using condition monitoring techniques within a framework of Failure Mode Avoidance.

Optimization of Process Parameters of Pressure Die Casting using Taguchi Methodology

The present work analyses different parameters of pressure die casting to minimize the casting defects. Pressure diecasting is usually applied for casting of aluminium alloys. Good surface finish with required tolerances and dimensional accuracy can be achieved by optimization of controllable process parameters such as solidification time, molten temperature, filling time, injection pressure and plunger velocity. Moreover, by selection of optimum process parameters the pressure die casting defects such as porosity, insufficient spread of molten material, flash etc. are also minimized. Therefore, a pressure die casting component, carburetor housing of aluminium alloy (Al2Si2O5) has been considered. The effects of selected process parameters on casting defects and subsequent setting of parameters with the levels have been accomplished by Taguchi-s parameter design approach. The experiments have been performed as per the combination of levels of different process parameters suggested by L18 orthogonal array. Analyses of variance have been performed for mean and signal-to-noise ratio to estimate the percent contribution of different process parameters. Confidence interval has also been estimated for 95% consistency level and three conformational experiments have been performed to validate the optimum level of different parameters. Overall 2.352% reduction in defects has been observed with the help of suggested optimum process parameters.

A Quantitative Tool for Analyze Process Design

Some quality control tools use non metric subjective information coming from experts, who qualify the intensity of relations existing inside processes, but without quantifying them. In this paper we have developed a quality control analytic tool, measuring the impact or strength of the relationship between process operations and product characteristics. The tool includes two models: a qualitative model, allowing relationships description and analysis; and a formal quantitative model, by means of which relationship quantification is achieved. In the first one, concepts from the Graphs Theory were applied to identify those process elements which can be sources of variation, that is, those quality characteristics or operations that have some sort of prelacy over the others and that should become control items. Also the most dependent elements can be identified, that is those elements receiving the effects of elements identified as variation sources. If controls are focused in those dependent elements, efficiency of control is compromised by the fact that we are controlling effects, not causes. The second model applied adapts the multivariate statistical technique of Covariance Structural Analysis. This approach allowed us to quantify the relationships. The computer package LISREL was used to obtain statistics and to validate the model.

Application of Advanced Oxidation Processes to Mefenamic Acid Elimination

The elimimation of mefenamic acid has been carried out by photolysis, ozonation, adsorption onto activated carbon (AC) and combinations of the previous single systems (O3+AC and O3+UV). The results obtained indicate that mefenamic acid is not photo-reactive, showing a relatively low quantum yield of the order of 6 x 10-4 mol Einstein-1. Application of ozone to mefenamic aqueous solutions instantaneously eliminates the pharmaceutical, achieving simultaneously a 40% of mineralization. Addition of AC to the ozonation process does not enhance the process, moreover, mineralization is completely inhibited if compared to results obtained by single ozonation. The combination of ozone and UV radiation led to the best results in terms of mineralization (60% after 120 min).

Comparison of Different Solvents and Extraction Methods for Isolation of Phenolic Compounds from Horseradish Roots (Armoracia rusticana)

Horseradish (Armoracia rusticana) is a perennial herb belonging to the Brassicaceae family and contains biologically active substances. The aim of the current research was to determine best method for extraction of phenolic compounds from horseradish roots showing high antiradical activity. Three genotypes (No. 105; No. 106 and variety ‘Turku’) of horseradish roots were extracted with eight different solvents: n-hexane, ethyl acetate, diethyl ether, 2-propanol, acetone, ethanol (95%), ethanol / water / acetic acid (80/20/1 v/v/v) and ethanol / water (80/20 by volume) using two extraction methods (conventional and Soxhlet). As the best solvents ethanol and ethanol / water solutions can be chosen. Although in Soxhlet extracts TPC was higher, scavenging activity of DPPH˙ radicals did not increase. It can be concluded that using Soxhlet extraction method more compounds that are not effective antioxidants.

Ontology Population via NLP Techniques in Risk Management

In this paper we propose an NLP-based method for Ontology Population from texts and apply it to semi automatic instantiate a Generic Knowledge Base (Generic Domain Ontology) in the risk management domain. The approach is semi-automatic and uses a domain expert intervention for validation. The proposed approach relies on a set of Instances Recognition Rules based on syntactic structures, and on the predicative power of verbs in the instantiation process. It is not domain dependent since it heavily relies on linguistic knowledge. A description of an experiment performed on a part of the ontology of the PRIMA1 project (supported by the European community) is given. A first validation of the method is done by populating this ontology with Chemical Fact Sheets from Environmental Protection Agency2. The results of this experiment complete the paper and support the hypothesis that relying on the predicative power of verbs in the instantiation process improves the performance.

Food Safety and Perceived Risk: A Case Study of Khao San Road, Bangkok, Thailand

Food safety is an important concern for holiday makers in foreign and unfamiliar tourist destinations. In fact, risk from food in these tourist destinations has an influence on tourist perception. This risk can potentially affect physical health and lead to an inability to pursue planned activities. The objective of this paper was to compare foreign tourists- demographics including gender, age and education level, with the level of perceived risk towards food safety. A total of 222 foreign tourists during their stay at Khao San Road in Bangkok were used as the sample. Independent- samples ttest, analysis of variance, and Least Significant Difference or LSD post hoc test were utilized. The findings revealed that there were few demographic differences in level of perceived risk among the foreign tourists. The post hoc test indicated a significant difference among the old and the young tourists, and between the higher and lower level of education. Ranks of tourists- perceived risk towards food safety unveiled some interesting results. Tourists- perceived risk of food safety in established restaurants can be ranked as i) cleanliness of dining utensils, ii) sanitation of food preparation area, and iii) cleanliness of food seasoning and ingredients. Whereas, the tourists- perceived risk of food safety in street food and drink can be ranked as i) cleanliness of stalls and pushcarts, ii) cleanliness of food sold, and iii) personal hygiene of street food hawkers or vendors.

Modeling and Control of Direct Driven PMSG for Ultra Large Wind Turbines

This paper focuses on developing an integrated reliable and sophisticated model for ultra large wind turbines And to study the performance and analysis of vector control on large wind turbines. With the advance of power electronics technology, direct driven multi-pole radial flux PMSG (Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator) has proven to be a good choice for wind turbines manufacturers. To study the wind energy conversion systems, it is important to develop a wind turbine simulator that is able to produce realistic and validated conditions that occur in real ultra MW wind turbines. Three different packages are used to simulate this model, namely, Turbsim, FAST and Simulink. Turbsim is a Full field wind simulator developed by National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The wind turbine mechanical parts are modeled by FAST (Fatigue, Aerodynamics, Structures and Turbulence) code which is also developed by NREL. Simulink is used to model the PMSG, full scale back to back IGBT converters, and the grid.

Photo Catalytic Oxidation Degradation of Volatile Organic Compound with Nano-TiO2/LDPE Composite Film

The photocatalytic activity efficiency of TiO2 for the degradation of Toluene in photoreactor can be enhanced by nano- TiO2/LDPE composite film. Since the amount of TiO2 affected the efficiency of the photocatalytic activity, this work was mainly concentrated on the effort to embed the high amount of TiO2 in the Polyethylene matrix. The developed photocatalyst was characterized by XRD, UV-Vis spectrophotometer and SEM. The SEM images revealed the high homogeneity of the deposition of TiO2 on the polyethylene matrix. The XRD patterns interpreted that TiO2 embedded in the PE matrix exhibited mainly in anatase form. In addition, the photocatalytic results show that the toluene removal efficiencies of 30±5%, 49±4%, 68±5%, 42±6% and 33±5% were obtained when using the catalyst loading at 0%, 10%, 15%, 25% and 50% (wt. cat./wt. film), respectively.

Application of Machine Learning Methods to Online Test Error Detection in Semiconductor Test

As in today's semiconductor industries test costs can make up to 50 percent of the total production costs, an efficient test error detection becomes more and more important. In this paper, we present a new machine learning approach to test error detection that should provide a faster recognition of test system faults as well as an improved test error recall. The key idea is to learn a classifier ensemble, detecting typical test error patterns in wafer test results immediately after finishing these tests. Since test error detection has not yet been discussed in the machine learning community, we define central problem-relevant terms and provide an analysis of important domain properties. Finally, we present comparative studies reflecting the failure detection performance of three individual classifiers and three ensemble methods based upon them. As base classifiers we chose a decision tree learner, a support vector machine and a Bayesian network, while the compared ensemble methods were simple and weighted majority vote as well as stacking. For the evaluation, we used cross validation and a specially designed practical simulation. By implementing our approach in a semiconductor test department for the observation of two products, we proofed its practical applicability.

Simulation Model for Predicting Dengue Fever Outbreak

Dengue fever is prevalent in Malaysia with numerous cases including mortality recorded over the years. Public education on the prevention of the desease through various means has been carried out besides the enforcement of legal means to eradicate Aedes mosquitoes, the dengue vector breeding ground. Hence, other means need to be explored, such as predicting the seasonal peak period of the dengue outbreak and identifying related climate factors contributing to the increase in the number of mosquitoes. Simulation model can be employed for this purpose. In this study, we created a simulation of system dynamic to predict the spread of dengue outbreak in Hulu Langat, Selangor Malaysia. The prototype was developed using STELLA 9.1.2 software. The main data input are rainfall, temperature and denggue cases. Data analysis from the graph showed that denggue cases can be predicted accurately using these two main variables- rainfall and temperature. However, the model will be further tested over a longer time period to ensure its accuracy, reliability and efficiency as a prediction tool for dengue outbreak.

Parkinsons Disease Classification using Neural Network and Feature Selection

In this study, the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP)with Back-Propagation learning algorithm are used to classify to effective diagnosis Parkinsons disease(PD).It-s a challenging problem for medical community.Typically characterized by tremor, PD occurs due to the loss of dopamine in the brains thalamic region that results in involuntary or oscillatory movement in the body. A feature selection algorithm along with biomedical test values to diagnose Parkinson disease.Clinical diagnosis is done mostly by doctor-s expertise and experience.But still cases are reported of wrong diagnosis and treatment. Patients are asked to take number of tests for diagnosis.In many cases,not all the tests contribute towards effective diagnosis of a disease.Our work is to classify the presence of Parkinson disease with reduced number of attributes.Original,22 attributes are involved in classify.We use Information Gain to determine the attributes which reduced the number of attributes which is need to be taken from patients.The Artificial neural networks is used to classify the diagnosis of patients.Twenty-Two attributes are reduced to sixteen attributes.The accuracy is in training data set is 82.051% and in the validation data set is 83.333%.

SIP-Based QoS Management Architecture for IP Multimedia Subsystems over IP Access Networks

True integration of multimedia services over wired or wireless networks increase the productivity and effectiveness in today-s networks. IP Multimedia Subsystems are Next Generation Network architecture to provide the multimedia services over fixed or mobile networks. This paper proposes an extended SIP-based QoS Management architecture for IMS services over underlying IP access networks. To guarantee the end-to-end QoS for IMS services in interconnection backbone, SIP based proxy Modules are introduced to support the QoS provisioning and to reduce the handoff disruption time over IP access networks. In our approach these SIP Modules implement the combination of Diffserv and MPLS QoS mechanisms to assure the guaranteed QoS for real-time multimedia services. To guarantee QoS over access networks, SIP Modules make QoS resource reservations in advance to provide best QoS to IMS users over heterogeneous networks. To obtain more reliable multimedia services, our approach allows the use of SCTP protocol over SIP instead of UDP due to its multi-streaming feature. This architecture enables QoS provisioning for IMS roaming users to differentiate IMS network from other common IP networks for transmission of realtime multimedia services. To validate our approach simulation models are developed on short scale basis. The results show that our approach yields comparable performance for efficient delivery of IMS services over heterogeneous IP access networks.