I3WSN: Industrial Intelligent Wireless Sensor Networks for indoor environments

Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) technologies have been successfully applied to a great variety of outdoor scenarios but, in practical terms, little effort has been applied for indoor environments, and even less in the field of industrial applications. This article presents an intelligent SWE application for an indoor and industrial scenario, with the aim of improving and increasing the levels of human safety. The base low-level architecture is built on top of wireless sensor networks (WSN) connected to a Sensor Observation Service (SOS). Higher layers in the architecture include services that make real time decisions based on the collected data. Both simulation and experimental results are presented. The paper shows the viability of our approach in terms of performance, scalability, modularity and safety.     

The hydrocarbon fraction of virgin olive oil and changes resulting from refining

In numerous Spanish virgin olive oils, 6,10-dimethyl-1-undecene, various sesquiterpenes, the series ofn-alkanes from C14 to C35, n-8-heptadecene and squalene are the only less volatile components detected by gas chromatography in the hydrocarbon fraction. In oils from olives of the Arbequine variety, a series ofn-9-alkenes has also been found. In refined oils, notable features are the absence of the most volatile compounds and the appearance of other hydrocarbons produced during the refining process. Among these,n-alkanes, alkadienes (mainlyn-hexacosadiene), stigmasta-3,5-diene, isomerization products of squalene, isoprenoidal polyolefins coming from hydroxy derivatives of squalene and steroidal hydrocarbons derived from 24-methylene cycloartanol were identified. Physical refining produces larger amounts of degradation products and greater losses ofn-alkanes than chemical processing. Squalene is the major hydrocarbon component in all oils, both virgin and refined. The ranges of concentration for the different hydrocarbons found in Spanish virgin olive oils are presented.     

The Instabilisation of Dye-Fibre Bonds by Peroxide Treatments

The results are presented of an investigation into the instability induced in dye-fibre bonds by peroxide treatments. The nature of the reactions involved are discussed.     

Field Evaluation of Plant Odor and Pheromonal Combinations for Attracting Plum Curculios

The attractiveness of different synthetic host odors and a synthetic aggregation pheromone (grandisoic acid [GA]) to overwintered adult plum curculios (PCs), Conotrachelus nenuphar (Herbst) (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), was examined using two types of traps (sticky panels and black pyramids) placed in border areas surrounding an unsprayed section of an apple orchard in Massachusetts. In 2001, we evaluated the response of PCs to three synthetic fruit volatiles (benzaldehyde [BEN], ethyl isovalerate [EIV], and limonene [LIM]) assessed alone and in combination with GA, as well as the response to GA alone and a no-odor (control) treatment. BEN was the only host volatile that synergized the response of PCs to GA for both trap types. For both trap types, GA was as attractive to PCs as a single component as when in combination with either EIV or LIM. In 2002, four release rates of BEN (0, 2.5, 10, and 40 mg/day) and two release rates of GA (1 and 2 mg/day) were evaluated for attractiveness to PCs using panel and pyramid traps. For panel traps, an increase in amount of GA released (from 1 to 2 mg/day) was associated with a 35% increase in captures. However, PC captures by pyramid traps were similar regardless of the amount of GA released. For panel traps, 10 and 40 mg/day of BEN were the most attractive release rates regardless of the amount of GA released. For pyramid traps baited with GA. PC captures were enhanced by the presence of BEN, regardless of release rate. In 2003, GA at 1 mg/day + BEN at 80 mg/day of release did not enhance PC captures by panel traps relative to lower release rates of BEN. Pyramid traps releasing GA at 1 mg/day performed best when baited with BEN at 10 mg/day of release; a release rate of 80 mg/day of BEN decreased the attractiveness of the binary combination of BEN + GA. Combined results suggest that BEN at 10 mg/day + GA at 1 mg/day of release constitutes an attractive lure that may improve the effectiveness of monitoring traps for PCs.     

Influence of different reactor types on Nannochloropsis oculata microalgae culture for lipids and fatty acid production

Greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by burning of fossil fuels cause global warming. One option is obtaining biodiesel. Nannochloropsis oculata was cultured under different light intensities and reactors at 25°C for 21 days with f/2 medium to assess their effects on cell density, lipid, and fatty acids (FAs). N. oculata improved cell density on fed-batch glass tubular reactor (7 L) at 200 μmol E m⁻² s⁻¹, yielding 3.5 × 10⁸ cells ml⁻¹, followed by fed-batch Erlenmeyer flask (1 L) at 650 μmol E m⁻² s⁻¹ with 1.7 × 10⁸ cells ml⁻¹. The highest total lipid contents (% g lipid × g dry biomass⁻¹) were 44.4 ± 0.8% for the reactor (1 L) at 650 μmol E m⁻² s⁻¹ and 35.2 ± 0.2% for the tubular reactor (7 L) at 200 μmol E m⁻² s⁻¹, until twice as high compared with the control culture (Erlenmeyer flask 1 L, 80 μmol E m⁻² s⁻¹) with 21.2 ± 1%. Comparing the total lipid content at 200 μmol E m⁻² s⁻¹, tubular reactor (7 L) and reactor 1 L achieved 35.2 ± 0.2% and 28.3 ± 1%, respectively, indicating the effect of shape reactor. The FAs were affected by high light intensity, decreasing SFAs to 2.5%, and increased monounsaturated fatty acids + polyunsaturated fatty acids to 2.5%. PUFAs (20:5n-3) and (20:4n-3) were affected by reactor shape, decreasing by half in the tubular reactor. In the best culture, fed-batch tubular reactor (7 L) at 200 μmol E m⁻² s⁻¹ contains major FAs (16:0; 38.06 ± 0.16%), (16:1n-7; 30.74 ± 0.58%), and (18:1n-9; 17.15 ± 0.91%).     

Providing security and fault tolerance in P2P connections between clouds for mHealth services

The mobile health (mHealth) and electronic health (eHealth) systems are useful to maintain a correct administration of health information and services. However, it is mandatory to ensure a secure data transmission and in case of a node failure, the system should not fall down. This fact is important because several vital systems could depend on this infrastructure. On the other hand, a cloud does not have infinite computational and storage resources in its infrastructure or would not provide all type of services. For this reason, it is important to establish an interrelation between clouds using communication protocols in order to provide scalability, efficiency, higher service availability and flexibility which allow the use of services, computing and storage resources of other clouds. In this paper, we propose the architecture and its secure protocol that allows exchanging information, data, services, computing and storage resources between all interconnected mHealth clouds. The system is based on a hierarchic architecture of two layers composed by nodes with different roles. The routing algorithm used to establish the connectivity between the nodes is the shortest path first (SPF), but it can be easily changed by any other one. Our architecture is highly scalable and allows adding new nodes and mHealth clouds easily, while it tries to maintain the load of the cloud balanced. Our protocol design includes node discovery, authentication and fault tolerance. We show the protocol operation and the secure system design. Finally we provide the performance results in a controlled test bench.     

Electrostatic force microscopy of self-assembled peptide structures

In this report electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) is used to study different peptide self-assembled structures such as tubes and particles. It is shown that not only geometrical information can be obtained using EFM, but also information about the composition of different structures. In particular we use EFM to investigate the structures of diphenylalanine peptide tubes, particles, and CSGAITIG peptide particles placed on pre-fabricated SiO(2) surfaces with a backgate. We show that the cavity in the peptide tubes could be due to the presence of water residues. Additionally we show that self-assembled amyloid peptides form spherical solid structures containing the same self-assembled peptide in its interior. In both cases transmission electron microscopy is used to verify these structures. Further, the limitations of the EFM technique are discussed, especially when the observed structures become small compared with the radius of the AFM tip used. Finally, an agreement between the detected signal and the structure of the hollow peptide tubes is demonstrated.     

Applying model-driven engineering to the development of Rich Internet Applications for Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) applications have been gradually ported to the Web in search of a global platform for the consumption and publication of data and services. On the Internet, apart from techniques for data/knowledge management, BI Web applications need interfaces with a high level of interoperability (similar to the traditional desktop interfaces) for the visualisation of data/knowledge. In some cases, this has been provided by Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The development of these BI RIAs is a process traditionally performed manually and, given the complexity of the final application, it is a process which might be prone to errors. The application of model-driven engineering techniques can reduce the cost of development and maintenance (in terms of time and resources) of these applications, as they demonstrated by other types of Web applications. In the light of these issues, the paper introduces the S^m4RIA-B methodology, i.e., a model-driven methodology for the development of RIA as BI Web applications. In order to overcome the limitations of RIA regarding knowledge management from the Web, this paper also presents a new RIA platform for BI, called RI@BI, which extends the functionalities of traditional RIAs by means of Semantic Web technologies and B2B techniques. Finally, we evaluate the whole approach on a case study—the development of a social network site for an enterprise project manager.     

Waveform diversity via mutual information

A novel criterion for waveform diversity in radar systems is presented that is based on the information theoretic concept of Shannon mutual information (MI). In general, waveform diversity refers to adaptively changing a transmitted waveform based on the target and interference environment. MI is a measure of the information in a random variable or vector about another random variable or vector. It is shown herein that an MI framework provides the basis for a general and powerful criterion for evaluation of candidate waveforms, as well as design of waveforms. The criterion inherently includes radar system and scenario statistical information. In addition, the criterion reduces to a simple analytical function of a set of scalar parameters for the case of Gaussian-distributed proper random processes. It is shown that those scalar parameters are also the canonical correlations of the random variables in the MI expression that involves the received radar signal at two distinct time instants. This property suggests the possibility of new insights into waveform diversity using MI as a criterion. The concept is presented assuming a SAR system configuration, but can be extended to other radar modes and functions, as well as to other sensing applications.     

Acclimatization model of an aerobic bioreactor for the treatment of toxic wastewater

This work proposes a mathematical model for the acclimatization process of a bioreactor treating toxic wastewater. Experimental data was used to identify the changing kinetic parameters of the model as acclimatization progresses. It was found that only one key parameter, the specific biomass growth rate function, changed during the acclimatization process. Therefore, an acclimatization model was proposed to explain the changes of this parameter.