Effects of different carbon sources and C/N values on nonvolatile taste components of Pleurotus eryngii

Pleurotus eryngii, the second largest industrial cultivation mushroom in China, is usually cultivated on substrates mainly consisting of sawdust and corncob. In this study, experiments were performed to determine the effects of different carbon sources and C/N values on nonvolatile taste components of P. eryngii. The effects of different carbon sources on nonvolatile taste components levels revealed that sawdust was beneficial to high levels of crude protein, amino acids, 5′‐nucleotides and equivalent umami concentration, while corncob was beneficial to high contents of carbohydrate, polysaccharides and trehalose. At the similar C/N values, relatively higher sawdust content was beneficial to umami amino acid production, while relatively higher corncob content was beneficial to high contents of carbohydrate, polysaccharides and mannitol. Higher C/N value was beneficial to high levels of crude protein, amino acids, 5′‐nucleotides and equivalent umami concentration, while lower C/N value was beneficial to high contents of carbohydrate, polysaccharides and trehalose. These results provided information for P. eryngii fruit body industrial cultivation to obtain specific nonvolatile taste components with high levels.     

Modelling of chromatic contrast for retrieval of wallpaper images

Colour remains one of the key factors in presenting an object and, consequently, has been widely applied in retrieval of images based on their visual contents. However, a colour appearance changes with the change of viewing surroundings, the phenomenon that has not been paid attention yet while performing colour‐based image retrieval. To comprehend this effect, in this article, a chromatic contrast model, CAMcc, is developed for the application of retrieval of colour intensive images, cementing the gap that most of existing colour models lack to fill by taking simultaneous colour contrast into account. Subsequently, the model is applied to the retrieval task on a collection of museum wallpapers of colour‐rich images. In comparison with current popular colour models including CIECAM02, HSI and RGB, with respect to both foreground and background colours, CAMcc appears to outperform the others with retrieved results being closer to query images. In addition, CAMcc focuses more on foreground colours, especially by maintaining the balance between both foreground and background colours, while the rest of existing models take on dominant colours that are perceived the most, usually background tones. Significantly, the contribution of the investigation lies in not only the improvement of the accuracy of colour‐based image retrieval but also the development of colour contrast model that warrants an important place in colour and computer vision theory, leading to deciphering the insight of this age‐old topic of chromatic contrast in colour science. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 361–373, 2015     

A practical reliability assessment approach and its application for pile-stabilized slopes using FORM and support vector machine

Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment - Many uncertainties exist in pile-stabilized slopes which make their design substantially complicated. In this paper, a first-order reliability...     

Tensile testing and fracture mechanism analysis of polyvinyl alcohol nanofibrous webs

A tensile properties testing study was conducted to understand the influence of thickness, cross-head speed (speed of testing), gauge length (GL; specimen test length), and sample shape on important tensile properties of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) nanofiber webs. The effects of each testing parameter on load at break, extension at break, Young's modulus, and tensile stress–strain curve of PVA nanofiber webs are analyzed. The Welch two sample t-tests show the significant difference among tested data. Using interaction plots, two-way analysis of variance, and margin mean plots, the interaction effects among testing parameters have been analyzed. Of all the factors, cross-head speed, the interaction among GL, and sample thickness (GL: Thickness) and the interaction among GL, testing speed and sample thickness (GL: Speed: Thickness) have significant influence on the tensile properties of PVA nanofiber webs. Moreover, the hypothesized model of mechanism of tensile strain–stress curve of PVA nanofiber webs has been proposed. Based on the model, the tensile strain–stress curve can be split into three stages: linear elastic, partial break up, and complete breakage. This study will provide a better understanding of tensile testing parameters' effects and their interaction effects on the tensile properties of nanowebs.     

Leader-following consensus of fractional-order multi-agent systems via adaptive control

This article focuses on the consensus problem of leader-following fractional-order multi-agent systems (MASs) with general linear and Lipschitz nonlinear dynamics. First, the distributed adaptive protocols for linear and nonlinear fractional-order MASs are constructed, respectively. We allow the control coupling gains to be time varying for each agent. Moreover, the adaptive modification schemes for the control gain are designed, which renders smaller control gains and thus requires smaller amplitude on the control input without sacrificing consensus convergence. Second, based on fractional-order Lyapunov stability theorem and Barbalat's lemma, two novel sufficient conditions in terms of linear matrix inequalities are provided to ensure that the leader-following consensus can be obtained in the case for any undirected connected communication graph. Furthermore, we show that the proposed algorithm also works for consensus of agents with intrinsic Lipschitz nonlinear dynamics. As a result, the proposed framework requires no global information and thus can be implemented in a fully distributed manner. Finally, the numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of obtained the theoretical results.