In Vivo and In Vitro Assessment of Antinutritional Factors in Peanut and Soy

Raw and heat processed peanut flours were found to contain higher in vitro trypsin inhibitor activity and lectin content than similarly processed soy flour. When fed to weanling rats at a level of 10% protein, the response pattern in food consumption, growth, liver function, and serum chemistries was not consistent among or between the groups. It is concluded that the levels of antinutritional factors in legumes do not correlate with their overall biological impact in feeding studies with the rat.     

Investigation of the optimum differential gear ratio for real driving cycles by experiment design and genetic algorithm

Experiment statistical method and genetic algorithms based optimization method are used to obtain the optimum differential gear ratio for heavy truck that provides best fuel consumption when changing the working condition that affects its torque and speed range. The aim of the study is to obtain the optimum differential gear ratio with fast and accurate optimization calculation without affecting drivability characteristics of the vehicle according to certain driving cycles that represent the new working conditions of the truck. The study is carried on a mining dump truck YT3621 with 9 forward shift manual transmission. Two loading conditions,no load and 40 t,and four on road real driving cycles have been discussed. The truck powertrain is modeled using GT-drive,and DOE-post processing tool of the GT-suite is used for DOE analysis and genetic algorithm optimization.     

Electric-field induced fluctuations in laser generated plasma plume

The effect of an external electric field on laser-generated plasma has been studied. It is observed that the laser-generated plasma can be used for the ignition of a spark in the presence of a low voltage external electric field. An eight-fold emission intensity enhancement in Cu Ⅰ spectral lines are measured as compared to the signal intensity in the absence of an external electric field.The plasma parameters remain the same initially, up to a few microseconds after the generation of plasma, and this feature makes it more interesting for the quantitative analysis of any sample using laser induced breakdown spectroscopy(LIBS). In the presence of an external electric field,fluctuations(contraction and expansion) in the laser-generated plasma are observed which increase the plasma decay time and consequently result in enhanced signal intensity.     

Destructive and non-destructive evaluation of concrete for optimum sand to aggregate volume ratio

Aggregates are the biggest contributor to concrete volume and are a crucial parameter in dictating its mechanical properties. As such, a detailed experimental investigation was carried out to evaluate the effect of sand-to-aggregate volume ratio (s/a) on the mechanical properties of concrete utilizing both destructive and non-destructive testing (employing UPV (ultrasonic pulse velocity) measurements). For investigation, standard cylindrical concrete samples were made with different s/a (0.36, 0.40, 0.44, 0.48, 0.52, and 0.56), cement content (340 and 450 kg/m³), water-to-cement ratio (0.45 and 0.50), and maximum aggregate size (12 and 19 mm). The effect of these design parameters on the 7, 14, and 28 d compressive strength, tensile strength, elastic modulus, and UPV of concrete were assessed. The careful analysis demonstrates that aggregate proportions and size need to be optimized for formulating mix designs; optimum ratios of s/a were found to be 0.40 and 0.44 for the maximum aggregate size of 12 and 19 mm, respectively, irrespective of the W/C (water-to-cement) and cement content.     

Decentralized state estimation in large-scale systems

A novel approach to decentralized state estimation in a large-scale interconnected system is proposed. The method assumes a known model for the local subsystem only, and therefore is suitable when the other subsystem models and the interaction matrices are partially or totally unknown. An innovation representation suitable for decentralized subsystem state estimation is derived. The state estimation problem is then solved through the parametric identification of the innovation representation. The identification algorithm is based upon a pseudo-linear regression (PLR) principle that attempts minimization of the innovation variances.     

Autoregressive models in stochastic approximation algorithms for parameter estimation

This paper describes an on-line procedure for estimating the parameters of linear discrete time systems when input and output are subjected to measurement noise of unknown statistics. The algorithm is derived through stochastic approximation, To ensure unbiased parameter estimates, the correlated part of the residuals are first estimated by modelling the residuals as an autoregressive series, and then subtracted from the estimated residuals. The algorithm estimates the system parameters and noise parameters simultaneously. Three gain expressions are derived for the estimation algorithm. They are («) scalar gain, (b) diagonal matrix gain, and (c) square matrix gain.     

Technical Note Photointerpretation of Pleistocene Mediterranean ridges south-west of Alexandria

Abstract

The Pleistocene ridges south-west of Alexandria are of marine origin and represent the ancient shoreline of the former sea levels. Several authors have described the nature, origin and geomorphology of the Pleistocene ridges. The objective is to delineate these ridges using aerial photomosaics at 1:100000 scale and a Landsat image at 1:250000 scale.

The area is covered by beach sands in the northern part and consolidated limestone forming coastal ridges southwards. The lowlands between the ridges are occupied by marshes, lagoons or mixtures of clay and lime materials. Plant cover occurs in the central part. The different ridges recognized photogeologically are eight ridges and the foreshore ridges are more distinct than those of the backshore. Owing to the presence of plant cover, some ridges appear as faint lines. The ridges and lowlands appear on photomosaics with tonal contrast where successive light and dark toned areas can be easily identified. The interpreted ridges were correlated with those in the topographic map with the same scale and covering the same area. It was found that a number of these ridges follow the configuration of the relief where they are represented by high peaks. Ridges appear as elongated alignments nearly parallel with the Mediterranean Sea shore with a general trend NE-SW. The presence of some minerals such as augite and the size of their grains indicate that the sea currents and prevailing wind directions were coming mainly from the east or north-east whereas the reverse case occurs nowadays. Photointerpretation indicated the presence of a number of fractures trending NW-SE, dissecting the ridges in the northern part of the area.     

Trajectory estimation of manoeuvring re-entry vehicles and non-linear filtering

This paper presents a modified Sridhar filter which is applied to the problem of the real-time estimation of the trajectory of a manoeuvring re-entry vehicle (MARV) from its radar observations. The Sridhar filter is based on optimal control concepts, specifically the Pontryagin minimum principle and the method of invariant imbedding. In this approach the unknown forces on the MARV are treated as controls that drive the MARV dynamics to track the noisy observed trajectory. This treatment differs from that used with the extended Kalman filter (EKF), where a new state vector of the unknown forces acting on the MARV considered as Wiener processes is augmented to the MARV state vector. The Sridhar filter does not increase the MARV state vector so its computational time, for the cases studied, is about 20% that of the EKF. The performance, as measured by the point error, of the proposed approach is even better than that of the conventional EKF.     

On a case of dynamic feedback optimization†

In this paper the problem of selecting an optimal feedback controller, from a class of linear systems, for a non-linear dynamical system, is reduced to a standard parameter optimization problem given by Boltyanskii. A necessary condition for the selection of the optimal parameters is presented.     

On optimal parameter selection for stochastic Ito differential systems

In this paper necessary conditions for optimal parameter selection of stochastic Ito differential systems are developed. Our main result, a necessary condition for optimality, is presented in theorem 1. Its proof is based on some recent results of Fleming (1968, p. 210), The result is illustrated by its application to the problem of determination of the optimal feedback gain matrix for a noisy linear regulator.