Relationship Between Oil Uptake and Water Content During Deep-Fat Frying of Potato Particulates Under Isothermal Temperature

The purpose of this study is to correlate water content and oil uptake with the structural changes of potato particulates during deep-fat frying. Raw potato particulates were sliced to form cylinders of 0.006 m diameter × 0.006 m length and subjected to deep-fat frying at isothermal oil temperatures of 160, 190 and 220 °C. The microstructure properties were assessed using a field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM). Previous results showed that a simultaneous two first-order kinetic model adequately predicted water loss of potato particulates during isothermal frying. In this study, a simple rational model with two parameters in which regression squared (Rsqr) reaches 0.983 shows that oil uptake can be expressed by water content. The cross-sectional structure of potato particulates observed using FESEM is different from the surface structure. Regardless of the frying temperature, pores not only become larger but also increase in number after the transition time. The observations of structural changes at the surface and inner section of potato particulates through the pictures of FESEM are critical. This physical evidence supports our previous assumption that the mechanisms of water loss (two-stage rate processes) before and after transition time are different.     

Critical Evaluation of Compression Interpretation Criteria for Drilled Shafts

This paper is a critical evaluation of the interpretation criteria of drilled shafts under axial compression loading. A wide variety of load test data are used for analysis, and these data are divided into drained and undrained databases. The interpretation criteria are examined from these load test results to establish a consistent compression interpretation criterion. Among these criteria, the range of each interpretation method presents approximately the same trend for both drained and undrained conditions. The statistical results show that the smaller the compression displacement, the higher the coefficient of variation. Moreover, the undrained load test results reveal less variability than the drained results. The load-displacement curve of a drained loading also demonstrates more ductility than that for undrained loading. Based on these analyses, the relative merits and interrelationships of these criteria are established, and specific design recommendations for the interpretation of compression drilled shaft load test, in terms of both capacity and displacement, are given.     

Nanomechanical analyses of porous SiO2 low-dielectric-constant films for evaluation of interconnect structure reliability

Porous SiO₂ low-dielectric-constant films containing different porosities and sizes of uniformly distributed pores were prepared in this study. Their nanomechanical properties including true flow stress and fracture toughness were analyzed by a nanoindentation test. The hardness and elastic modulus of the films prepared with an ethanol molar ratio of 3 and an aging time of 16 h reached maximum values of 2.4 and 40 GPa, respectively. With increasing ethanol molar ratio, the porosity increased, and the mechanical properties consequently decreased. With increasing aging time, the mechanical properties increased and then dropped due to enlarged pore sizes. From converted true flow stress, the porous SiO₂ films were found to yield at an ultimate stress of 3.1 GPa, and the maximum fracture energy release rate was calculated as 3.4 J/m². The plastic deformation and fracture behavior of the porous films was observed through crack initiation and propagation along the large amount of pores.     

A single-layer PDMS-on-silicon hybrid microactuator with multi-axis out-of-plane motion capabilities-part II: fabrication and characterization

This paper reports on fabrication and characterization of a new electrostatic microactuator that achieves out-of-plane multi-axis motion with a single silicon device layer. The multi-axis motion with the simple actuator design is possible by incorporating a three-dimensional (3-D) polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microstructure. This paper develops a new device processing method named "Soft-Lithographic Lift-Off and Grafting (SLLOG)" to fabricate the previously designed PDMS-on-silicon hybrid actuator structure. SLLOG is a low-temperature (less than 150/spl deg/C) process that allows replica molded PDMS microstructures to be integrated in silicon micromachined device patterns. The fabricated actuator is characterized using laser vibrometry. The experimental results demonstrate actuation motions achieved in three independent axes with fast dynamic response reaching a bandwidth of about 5 kHz. The fabricated PDMS-on-silicon actuator yields a vertical displacement up to 5 /spl mu/m and rotational motions with a 0.6-/spl deg/ tilting angle at a 40-V peak-to-peak ac actuation voltage.     

Fabrication of SU-8 embedded microchannels with circular cross-section

This paper proposes a novel technique for fabricating microchannels in SU-8 by inserting optical-fibers as sacrificial moulds. The embedded circular microchannels, with inner diameters of 36, 80, and 125 μm (i.e., the diameters of optical-fibers), have been made successfully using a low-temperature fabrication process; where the SU-8 transparent negative-bone photo-resist is selected as the structure layer built in multilayers. Additionally, low-cost ultraviolet is applied as the exposure source to pattern the thin film photo-resist. Preliminary results show that the microchannels fabricated with the proposed technique have an average surface roughness (Ra) of the inner wall less than 10 nm and roundness deviation less than 7%. This paper also discusses the wetting behavior of the SU-8 surfaces before and after dipping in the hydrofluoric acid, and summarizes the relationship between the etching rate of sacrificial optical-fibers, etching temperature, concentration, and channel size. Finally, the etching rate of sacrificial optical-fibers vs. etching temperature subject to different concentrations and channel sizes is summarized and explained. This new fabrication technique of microchannel manufacture provides a new approach in selecting SU-8 for the structure material containing microchannels.     

A Multicriteria Collaborative Filtering Approach Using the Indifference Relation and its Application to Initiator Recommendation for Group-Buying

For recommender systems, the main aim of the popular collaborative filtering approaches is to recommend items that users with similar preferences have liked in the past. Single-criterion recommender systems have been successfully used in several applications. Because leveraging multicriteria information can potentially improve recommendation accuracy, multicriteria rating systems that allow users to assign ratings to various content attributes of items they have consumed have become the focus in recommendation systems. By treating the recommendation of items as a multicriteria decision problem, it is interesting to incorporate the preference relation of users of multicriteria decision making (MCDM) into the similarity measure for a collaborative filtering approach. For this, the well-known indifference relation can justify a discrimination or similarity between any two users, if outranking relation theory is incorporated. The applicability of the proposed single-criterion and multicriteria recommendation approaches to the recommendation of initiators on a group-buying website was examined. Experimental results have demonstrated that the generalization ability of the proposed multicriteria recommendation approach performs well in comparison to other single-criterion and multicriteria collaborative filtering approaches.     

Quantitative analysis of the ankle strategy under translational platform disturbance.

The ankle strategy is one of the postural adjustment maneuvers humans utilize when the support platform is disturbed. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the ankle strategy. A three-link sagittal biped model is considered. The first link represents the two legs locked together. The second link represents the two thighs locked together. The third link represents the hip, the torso, the upper limbs, the neck, and the head. The dynamics, control, and stability of the three-link biped, under platform translation, are considered. The disturbance of the platform is represented as an input and the effect of the muscular system is reduced to a set of torques applied to the joints and across the joints. Two digital computer simulations are presented to demonstrate the behavior of the biped under backward or forward platform disturbance. The simulations are compared with experimental measurements of humans subjected to postural disturbances. It is shown that the effect of a horizontal disturbance at the ankle appears to be about 40 times that of the effect of the disturbance at the knees and at least a few hundred times larger than the effect of a disturbance at the hip. This means that, under translational platform disturbance, the ankle angle is subjected to the largest excursion. The knee and the hip angle excursions are relatively minor. Consequently, the biped, as a whole, appears to move as a single inverted pendulum. Major postural corrections are initiated by the ankle excursion. Further, when the available ankle torque is limited or nonexistent, the stability requires resorting to the knee or hip strategies.     

Recommending topics in dialogue

Several types of online chat system have been developed; however, there exist no recommendation systems for the recommendation of topics suitable for discussion with a given individual at a particular time. This paper proposes a hot-topic recommendation system based on analysis of the tweets posted by the user, his/her chat partners, and similar users of his/her chat partners, as well as hashtags trending in Twitter. In experiments, the proposed system, which is based on the well-known Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm, was shown to outperform existing recommendation systems with regard to computational efficiency as well as prediction accuracy.     

Single Criterion Net Flow Using Concordance and Discordance Relations

This article proposes a flow-based method using the single criterion net flow for pattern classification. Traditional single criterion net flow, generated on the basis of net partial concordance indices, measures the preference intensity for one pattern with respect to all others on this criterion. A concordance index measures the intensity of preference for one pattern over another pattern. Contrary to traditional flow-based methods, such as PROMETHEE, in which only the concordance relation is taken into account, the proposed method proposes a new definition of single criterion net flow using both concordance and discordance relations. This can balance pros and cons for the preference of one pattern over another pattern for a criterion. The final classification decision for a new pattern depends on its net flow. Criteria weights are determined using a genetic-algorithm-based approach. Empirical results involving bankruptcy prediction demonstrate that the proposed method performs well compared to other well-known classification methods.