Scholarly

Insights into Smoothies with High Levels of Fibre and Polyphenols: Factors Influencing Chemical, Rheological and Sensory Properties

Year: 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 5 244 - 253 Pages

Abstract: Attempts to add fibre and polyphenols (PPs) into popular beverages present challenges related to the properties of finished products such as smoothies. Consumer acceptability, viscosity and phenolic composition of smoothies containing high levels of fruit fibre (2.5-7.5 g per 300 mL serve) and PPs (250-750 mg per 300 mL serve) were examined. The changes in total extractable PP, vitamin C content, and colour of selected smoothies over a storage stability trial (4°C, 14 days) were compared. A set of acidic aqueous model beverages were prepared to further examine the effect of two different heat treatments on the stability and extractability of PPs. Results show that overall consumer acceptability of high fibre and PP smoothies was low, with average hedonic scores ranging from 3.9 to 6.4 (on a 1-9 scale). Flavour, texture and overall acceptability decreased as fibre and polyphenol contents increased, with fibre content exerting a stronger effect. Higher fibre content resulted in greater viscosity, with an elevated PP content increasing viscosity only slightly. The presence of fibre also aided the stability and extractability of PPs after heating. A reduction of extractable PPs, vitamin C content and colour intensity of smoothies was observed after a 14-day storage period at 4°C. Two heat treatments (75°C for 45 min or 85°C for 1 min) that are normally used for beverage production, did not cause significant reduction of total extracted PPs. It is clear that high levels of added fibre and PPs greatly influence the consumer appeal of smoothies, suggesting the need to develop novel formulation and processing methods if a satisfactory functional beverage is to be developed incorporating these ingredients.

Carbon Accumulation in Winter Wheat under Different Growing Intensity and Climate Change

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 11 657 - 660 Pages

Abstract: World population growth drives food demand, promotes intensification of agriculture, development of new production technologies and varieties more suitable for regional nature conditions. Climate change can affect the length of growing period, biomass and carbon accumulation in winter wheat. The increasing mean air temperature resulting from climate change can reduce the length of growth period of cereals, and without adequate adjustments in growing technologies or varieties, can reduce biomass and carbon accumulation. Deeper understanding and effective measures for monitoring and management of cereal growth process are needed for adaptation to changing climate and technological conditions.

A Security Model of Voice Eavesdropping Protection over Digital Networks

Year: 2007 Volume: 1 Issue: 2 177 - 181 Pages

Abstract: The purpose of this research is to develop a security model for voice eavesdropping protection over digital networks. The proposed model provides an encryption scheme and a personal secret key exchange between communicating parties, a so-called voice data transformation system, resulting in a real-privacy conversation. The operation of this system comprises two main steps as follows: The first one is the personal secret key exchange for using the keys in the data encryption process during conversation. The key owner could freely make his/her choice in key selection, so it is recommended that one should exchange a different key for a different conversational party, and record the key for each case into the memory provided in the client device. The next step is to set and record another personal option of encryption, either taking all frames or just partial frames, so-called the figure of 1:M. Using different personal secret keys and different sets of 1:M to different parties without the intervention of the service operator, would result in posing quite a big problem for any eavesdroppers who attempt to discover the key used during the conversation, especially in a short period of time. Thus, it is quite safe and effective to protect the case of voice eavesdropping. The results of the implementation indicate that the system can perform its function accurately as designed. In this regard, the proposed system is suitable for effective use in voice eavesdropping protection over digital networks, without any requirements to change presently existing network systems, mobile phone network and VoIP, for instance.

Crash Severity Modeling in Urban Highways Using Backward Regression Method

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 12 2753 - 2758 Pages

Abstract: Identifying and classifying intersections according to severity is very important for implementation of safety related counter measures and effective models are needed to compare and assess the severity. Highway safety organizations have considered intersection safety among their priorities. In spite of significant advances in highways safety, the large numbers of crashes with high severities still occur in the highways. Investigation of influential factors on crashes enables engineers to carry out calculations in order to reduce crash severity. Previous studies lacked a model capable of simultaneous illustration of the influence of human factors, road, vehicle, weather conditions and traffic features including traffic volume and flow speed on the crash severity. Thus, this paper is aimed at developing the models to illustrate the simultaneous influence of these variables on the crash severity in urban highways. The models represented in this study have been developed using binary Logit Models. SPSS software has been used to calibrate the models. It must be mentioned that backward regression method in SPSS was used to identify the significant variables in the model. Consider to obtained results it can be concluded that the main factor in increasing of crash severity in urban highways are driver age, movement with reverse gear, technical defect of the vehicle, vehicle collision with motorcycle and bicycle, bridge, frontal impact collisions, frontal-lateral collisions and multi-vehicle crashes in urban highways which always increase the crash severity in urban highways.

User Acceptance of Educational Games: A Revised Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT)

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 5 445 - 451 Pages

Abstract: Educational games (EG) seem to have lots of potential due to digital games popularity and preferences of our younger generations of learners. However, most studies focus on game design and its effectiveness while little has been known about the factors that can affect users to accept or to reject EG for their learning. User acceptance research try to understand the determinants of information systems (IS) adoption among users by investigating both systems factors and users factors. Upon the lack of knowledge on acceptance factors for educational games, we seek to understand the issue. This study proposed a model of acceptance factors based on Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). We use original model (performance expectancy, effort expectancy and social influence) together with two new determinants (learning opportunities and enjoyment). We will also investigate the effect of gender and gaming experience that moderate the proposed factors.

Consumer Adoption - Risk Factor of Mobile Banking Services

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 8 963 - 968 Pages

Abstract: Mobile banking services present a unique growth opportunity for mobile operators in emerging markets, and have already made good progress in bringing financial services to the previously unbanked populations of many developing countries. The potential is amazing, but what about the risks? In the complex process of establishing a mobile banking business model, many kinds of risks and factors need to be monitored and well-managed. Risk identification is the first stage of risk management. Correct risk identification ensures risk management effectiveness. Keeping the risks low makes it possible to use the full potential of mobile banking and carry out the planned business strategy. The focus should be on adoption of consumers which is the main risk factor of mobile banking services.

An Effective Traffic Control for both Real-time Bursts and Reliable Bursts in OBS Networks

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 11 1444 - 1449 Pages

Abstract: Optical burst switching(OBS) is considered as one of preferable network technologies for the next generation Internet. The Internet has two traffic classes, i.e. real-time bursts and reliable bursts. It is an important subject for OBS to achieve cooperated operation of real-time bursts and reliable bursts. In this paper, we proposes a new effective traffic control method named Separate TB+LB (Token Bucket + Leaky Bucket : TB+LB) method. The proposed method presents a new Token Bucket scheme for real-time bursts called as RBO-TB (Real-time Bursts Oriented Token Bucket). The method also applies the LB method to reliable bursts for obtaining better performance. This paper verifies the effectiveness of the Separate TB+LB method through the performance evaluation.

Reversible Watermarking on Stereo Image Sequences

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 11 2550 - 2555 Pages

Authors:
John N. Ellinas

Abstract: In this paper, a new reversible watermarking method is presented that reduces the size of a stereoscopic image sequence while keeping its content visible. The proposed technique embeds the residuals of the right frames to the corresponding frames of the left sequence, halving the total capacity. The residual frames may result in after a disparity compensated procedure between the two video streams or by a joint motion and disparity compensation. The residuals are usually lossy compressed before embedding because of the limited embedding capacity of the left frames. The watermarked frames are visible at a high quality and at any instant the stereoscopic video may be recovered by an inverse process. In fact, the left frames may be exactly recovered whereas the right ones are slightly distorted as the residuals are not embedded intact. The employed embedding method reorders the left frame into an array of consecutive pixel pairs and embeds a number of bits according to their intensity difference. In this way, it hides a number of bits in intensity smooth areas and most of the data in textured areas where resulting distortions are less visible. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is quite effective.

Neutralization of Alkaline Waste-Waters using a Blend of Microorganisms

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 4 202 - 205 Pages

Abstract: The efficient operation of any biological treatment process requires pre-treatment of incompatible pollutants such as acids, bases, oil, toxic substances, etc. which hamper the treatment of other major components which are otherwise degradable. The pre-treatment of alkaline waste-waters, generated from various industries like textile, paper & pulp, potato-processing industries, etc., having a pH of 10 or higher, is essential. The pre-treatment, i.e., neutralization of such alkaline waste-waters can be achieved by chemical as well as biological means. However, the biological pretreatment offers better package over the chemical means by being safe and economical. The biological pre-treatment can be accomplished by using a blend of microorganisms able to withstand such harsh alkaline conditions. In the present study, for the proper pre-treatment of alkaline waste-waters, a package of alkalophilic bacteria is formulated to neutralise the alkaline pH of the industrial waste-waters. The developed microbial package is cost-effective as well as environmental friendly.

Experimental Investigation on Flexural Behaviors in Framed Structure of PST Method

Year: 2011 Volume: 5 Issue: 3 575 - 580 Pages

Abstract: Existing underground pipe jacking methods use a reinforcing rod in a steel tube to obtain structural stiffness. However, some problems such as inconvenience of works and expensive materials resulted from limited working space and reinforcing works are existed. To resolve these problems, a new pipe jacking method, namely PST (Prestressed Segment Tunnel) method, was developed which used joint to connect the steel segment and form erection structure. For evaluating the flexural capacity of the PST method structure, a experimental test was conducted. The parameters considered in the test were span-to-depth ratio of segment, diameter of steel tube at the corner, prestressing force, and welding of joint. The flexural behaviours with the effect of load capacity in serviceability state according to different parameters were examined.. The frame with long segments could increase flexural stiffness and the specimen with large diameter of concave corner showed excellent resistance ability to the negative moment. In addition, welding of joints increased the flexural capacity.

An Efficient Algorithm for Reliability Lower Bound of Distributed Systems

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 3 586 - 588 Pages

Abstract: The reliability of distributed systems and computer networks have been modeled by a probabilistic network or a graph G. Computing the residual connectedness reliability (RCR), denoted by R(G), under the node fault model is very useful, but is an NP-hard problem. Since it may need exponential time of the network size to compute the exact value of R(G), it is important to calculate its tight approximate value, especially its lower bound, at a moderate calculation time. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for reliability lower bound of distributed systems with unreliable nodes. We also applied our algorithm to several typical classes of networks to evaluate the lower bounds and show the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Eye Location Based on Structure Feature for Driver Fatigue Monitoring

Year: 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 12 1857 - 1861 Pages

Authors:
Qiong Wang

Abstract: One of the most important problems to solve is eye location for a driver fatigue monitoring system. This paper presents an efficient method to achieve fast and accurate eye location in grey level images obtained in the real-word driving conditions. The structure of eye region is used as a robust cue to find possible eye pairs. Candidates of eye pair at different scales are selected by finding regions which roughly match with the binary eye pair template. To obtain real one, all the eye pair candidates are then verified by using support vector machines. Finally, eyes are precisely located by using binary vertical projection and eye classifier in eye pair images. The proposed method is robust to deal with illumination changes, moderate rotations, glasses wearing and different eye states. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness.

Health Risk Assessment of Heavy Metals Adsorbed in Particulates

Year: 2012 Volume: 6 Issue: 8 479 - 482 Pages

Authors:
Sadovska V.

Abstract: The progress of concentrations of particular heavy metals was assessed in chosen localities in region Moravia, the Czech Republic, from 2007 to 2009. Particular metals were observed in localities with various types and characterization of zone. Pb, Ni, As and Cd were emphasized as a result of their toxicity and potential adverse health effect to the exposed population. The progress of metal concentrations and their health effects in the most polluted localities were examined. According to the results, the air pollution limit values were not exceeded. Based on the health risk assessment, the probability of developing tumorous diseases is acceptable, except for the increased probability of cancer risk from long-term exposure to As.

Study Punching Shear of Steel Fiber Reinforced Self Compacting Concrete Slabs by Nonlinear Analysis

Year: 2013 Volume: 7 Issue: 9 644 - 655 Pages

Authors:
Khaled S. Ragab

Abstract: This paper deals with behavior and capacity of punching shear force for flat slabs produced from steel fiber reinforced self compacting concrete (SFRSCC) by application nonlinear finite element method. Nonlinear finite element analysis on nine slab specimens was achieved by using ANSYS software. A general description of the finite element method, theoretical modeling of concrete and reinforcement are presented. The nonlinear finite element analysis program ANSYS is utilized owing to its capabilities to predict either the response of reinforced concrete slabs in the post elastic range or the ultimate strength of a flat slabs produced from steel fiber reinforced self compacting concrete (SFRSCC). In order to verify the analytical model used in this research using test results of the experimental data, the finite element analysis were performed then a parametric study of the effect ratio of flexural reinforcement, ratio of the upper reinforcement, and volume fraction of steel fibers were investigated. A comparison between the experimental results and those predicted by the existing models are presented. Results and conclusions may be useful for designers, have been raised, and represented.

Preconditioned Jacobi Method for Fuzzy Linear Systems

Year: 2013 Volume: 7 Issue: 2 216 - 219 Pages

Abstract: A preconditioned Jacobi (PJ) method is provided for solving fuzzy linear systems whose coefficient matrices are crisp Mmatrices and the right-hand side columns are arbitrary fuzzy number vectors. The iterative algorithm is given for the preconditioned Jacobi method. The convergence is analyzed with convergence theorems. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the procedure and show the effectiveness and efficiency of the method.

Analysis of Electromagnetic Field Effects Using FEM for Transmission Lines Transposition

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 5 1111 - 1115 Pages

Abstract: This paper presents the mathematical model of electric field and magnetic field in transmission system, which performs in second-order partial differential equation. This research has conducted analyzing the electromagnetic field radiating to atmosphere around the transmission line, when there is the transmission line transposition in case of long distance distribution. The six types of 500 kV transposed HV transmission line with double circuit will be considered. The computer simulation is applied finite element method that is developed by MATLAB program. The problem is considered to two dimensions, which is time harmonic system with the graphical performance of electric field and magnetic field. The impact from simulation of six types long distance distributing transposition will not effect changing of electric field and magnetic field which surround the transmission line.

ANP-based Intra and Inter-industry Analysis for Measuring Spillover Effect of ICT Industries

Year: 2012 Volume: 6 Issue: 2 403 - 406 Pages

Abstract: The interaction among information and communication technology (ICT) industries is a recently ubiquitous phenomenon through fixed-mobile integration. To monitor the impact of interaction, previous research has mainly focused on measuring spillover effect among ICT industries using various methods. Among others, inter-industry analysis is one of the useful methods for examining spillover effect between industries. However, more complex ICT industries become, more important the impact within an industry is. Inter-industry analysis is limited in mirroring intra-relationships within an industry. Thus, this study applies the analytic network process (ANP) to measure the spillover effect, capturing all of the intra and inter-relationships. Using ANP-based intra and inter-industry analysis, the spillover effect is effectively measured, mirroring the complex structure of ICT industries. A main ICT industry and its linkages are also explored to show the current structure of ICT industries. The proposed approach is expected to allow policy makers to understand interactions of ICT industries and their impact.

Effect of Various Nozzle Profiles on Performance of a Two Phase Flow Jet Pump

Year: 2012 Volume: 6 Issue: 1 50 - 56 Pages

Abstract: This paper reports on the results of experimental investigations on the performance of a jet pump operated under selected primary flows to optimize the related parameters. For this purpose a two-phase flow jet pump was used employing various profiles of nozzles as the primary device which was designed, fabricated and used along with the combination of mixing tube and diffuser. The profiles employed were circular, conical, and elliptical. The diameter of the nozzle used was 4 mm. The area ratio of the jet pump was 0.16. The test facility created for this purpose was an open loop continuous circulation system. Performance of the jet pump was obtained as iso-efficiency curves on characteristic curves drawn for various water flow rates. To perform the suction capability, evacuation test was conducted at best efficiency point for all the profiles.

Effects of Some Natural Antioxidants Mixtures on Margarine Stability

Year: 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 1 31 - 34 Pages

Abstract: Application of synthetic antioxidants such as tertbutylhydroquinon (TBHQ), in spite of their efficiency, is questioned because of their possible carcinogenic effect. The purpose of this study was application of mixtures of natural antioxidants that provide the best oxidative stability for margarine. Antioxidant treatments included 10 various mixtures (F1- F10) containing 100-500ppm tocopherol mixture (Toc), 100-200ppm ascorbyl palmitate (AP), 100- 200ppm rosemary extract (Ros) and 1000ppm lecithin(Lec) along with a control or F0 (with no antioxidant) and F11 with 120ppm TBHQ. The effect of antioxidant mixtures on the stability of margarine samples during oven test (60°C), rancimat test at 110°C and storage at 4°C was evaluated. Final ranking of natural antioxidant mixtures was as follows: F2,F10>F5,F9>F8>F1,F3,F4>F6, F7. Considering the results of this research and ranking criteria, F2(200ppmAp + 200ppmRos) and F10(200ppmRos + 200ppmToc +1000ppmLec) were recommended as substitutes for TBHQ to maintain the quality and increase the shelf-life of margarine.

Numerical Analysis on the Performance of Heatsink with Microchannels

Year: 2012 Volume: 6 Issue: 7 1157 - 1161 Pages

Abstract: In this paper, numerical simulation is used to investigate the thermal performance of liquid cooling heatsink with microchannels due to geometric arrangement. Commercial software ICEPAK is utilized for the analysis. The considered parameters include aspect ratio, porosity and the length and height of microchannel. The aspect ratio varies from 3 to 16 and the length of microchannel is 10mm, 14mm, and 18mm. The height of microchannel is 2mm, 3mm and 4mm. It is found short channel have better thermal efficiency than long channel at 490Pa. No matter the length of channel the best aspect ratio is 4. It is also noted that pressure difference at 2940Pa the best aspect ratio from 4 to 8, it means pressure difference affect aspect ratio, effective thermal resistance at low pressure difference but lower effective thermal resistance at high pressure difference.

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