Improving gelling properties of myofibrillar proteins incorporating with cellulose micro/nanofibres

The effects of cellulose microfibres (CMFs, Average size: 100 ± 5 μm) and cellulose nanofibres (CNFs, Average size: 60 ± 3 nm) on the properties of myofibrillar protein (MP) gels from duck breast meat were studied. The results demonstrated that CMFs and CNFs were mostly connected to MP by non-covalent bonds, the diffusion and cross-linking of MP molecules was promoted, and a denser and more complete gel network was formed. With the increases of CMFs and CNFs concentration (0–10%), the hardness was increased by 13.15% and 19.78% for CMFs10% and CNFs10% gels, respectively, and the elasticity was increased by 40% and 80%, respectively. At the same concentration (0–10%), the increase in gel hardness, viscoelasticity and immobilised water content was greater in the CNFs-MP group than in the CMFs-MP group. The CNFs-MP group had a tighter gel network, and CNFs had a better potential to improve the gelation performance of MP.     

Ensemble relation network with multi-level measure

Fine-grained few-shot learning is a difficult task in image classification. The reason is that the discriminative features of fine-grained images are often located in local areas of the image, while most of the existing few-shotlearning image classification methods only use top-level features and adopt a single measure. In that way, the localfeatures of the sample cannot be learned well. In response to this problem, ensemble relation network with multi-level measure (ERN-MM) is proposed in this paper. It adds the relation modules in the shallow feature space tocompare the similarity between the samples in the local features, and finally integrates the similarity scores from thefeature spaces to assign the label of the query samples. So the proposed method ERN-MM can use local details andglobal information of different grains. Experimental results on different fine-grained datasets show that the proposedmethod achieves good classification performance and also proves its rationality.     

Lower down both ohmic and cathode polarization resistances of solid oxide fuel cell via hydrothermal modified gadolinia doped ceria barrier layer

Hydrothermal reaction in Cerium and Gadolinium solution as an optimization method is developed and first reported for the densification of gadolinia doped ceria, the barrier layer between Zirconia electrolyte and (La,Sr)(Co,Fe)O_3-δ cathode. This method is based on the hydrothermal reaction for nano particles in-situly grown on porous surface, to improve barrier layer density, alongside the sintering of cathode at 1075 °C. As a result, the ohmic resistance is prominently decreased by ～16.4 % at 750 °C for electrolyte supported symmetrical cell. Whereas, the cathode polarization resistance is decreased by as much as a factor of ～3 from 0.3702 Ω·cm² to 0.1325 Ω·cm² at 750 °C and $p_{O_2}=0.21atm$. Furthermore, the anode supported cell exhibits higher open circuit voltage, smaller area specific resistance, elevated performance output and less degradation. And this modified barrier layer shows reduced Sr migration in 300 h operation at 750 °C. The hydrothermal reaction is demonstrated to prepare denser and sintering-active barrier layer with faster oxygen ion transfer and better interface connection, with large-scale application prospects and cost-competitiveness.     

Water vapor volatilization and oxidation induced surface cracking of environmental barrier coating systems: A numerical approach

A numerical model is developed for surface crack propagation in brittle ceramic coatings, aiming at the intrinsic failure of rare-earth silicate environmental barrier coating systems (EBCs) under combustion conditions in advanced gas turbines. The main features of progressive degradation of EBCs in such conditions are captured, including selective silica vaporization in the top coat due to exposure to water vapor, diffusion path-dependent bond coat oxidation, as well as crack propagation during cyclic thermal loading. In light of these features, user-defined subroutines are implemented in finite element analysis, where surface crack growth is simulated by node separation. Numerical results are validated by existing experimental data, in terms of monosilicate layer thickening, thermal oxide growth, and fracture behaviors. The experimentally observed quasi-linear oxidation in the early stage is also elucidated. Furthermore, it is suggested that surface crack undergoes rapid propagation in the late stage of extended thermal cycling in water vapor and leads to catastrophic failure, driven by both thermal mismatch and oxide growth stresses. The latter is identified as the dominant mechanism of penetration. Based on detailed analyses of failure mechanisms, the optimization strategy of EBCs composition is proposed, balancing the trade-off between mechanical compliance and erosion resistance.     

A Dynamic Programming Framework for Large-Scale Online Clustering on Graphs

Neural Processing Letters - As a fundamental technique for data analysis, graph clustering grouping graph data into clusters has attracted great attentions in recent years. In this paper, we...     

Carbon dots: Principles and their applications in food quality and safety detection

ABSTRACT

In the past ten years, as a novel and prospective nanomaterials, carbon dots have acquired tremendous attention for their unique optical and physicochemical properties, high compatibility and low cost, as well as great potential in sensing area. This review aims to present the current detecting principles based on carbon dots and other nano biological technologies, involving fluorescence quenching and recovery mechanisms. The synthetic and modificatory approaches in making carbon dots including top-down and bottom-up methods, as well as surface passivation and heteroatom doping ways are introduced. Their applications in food area, concerning detection of nutrients, restricted or banned substances as well as foodborne pathogenic bacteria and the toxins secreted are discussed. Finally, the difficulties to be overcome or problems to be solved are presented, and other novel techniques to combine with carbon dots to obtain more stable and specific nanosensors in various fields are proposed. Although carbon dots based sensors have shown the potential in sensing aspect of food area, as food samples are complex in compositions that may cause interferences, more novel techniques are needed to combine with carbon dots to develop sensitive and specific sensing probes.