The rheological properties of ketchup as a function of different hydrocolloids and temperature

The flow properties of ketchup were assessed upon addition of commonly used food thickeners: guar, xanthan and CMC gum at three different concentrations (0.5%, 0.75% and 1%) and four temperatures (25, 35, 45 and 55 °C). The ketchup without supplementation served as a control. All ketchup formulations exhibited non-Newtonian, pseudoplastic behaviour at all temperatures and hydrocolloid levels. The Power-law and Herschel-Buckley model were successfully applied to fit the shear stress versus shear rate data. The flow behaviour indices, n and n' , varied in the range of 0.189–0.228 and 0.216–0.263, respectively. The consistency coefficients, k and k' , were in the range of 8.42–27.22 and 6.56–20.10 Pa s ⁿ , respectively. The addition of hydrocolloids increased the yield point (τ₀) and apparent viscosity of the ketchup in comparison to that of the control. The Arrhenius equation was successfully used to describe the effects of temperature on the apparent viscosity of the prepared formulations. The E _a value appeared in the range between 5492.6 and 21475.8 J mol⁻¹.     

Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Regional Trends and Shift Changes of Autocorrelated Temperature Series in Urmia Lake Basin

Recently, the Urmia Lake located in northwestern Iran which is the second largest hyper saline in the world suffers from the significant fluctuations of water level and surface area. The current study tries to investigate the spatiotemporal trends of mean (T_mean), maximum (T_max) and minimum (T_min) temperatures of monthly, seasonal and annual time-series. To do so, the data of 15 temperature gauge stations within the Urmia Lake basin, for the period 1972–2011 was employed. The pre-whitening approach was applied to remove the effects of serial correlation in the air temperature series based on the Mann-Kendall (MK) test. The results of Ljung-Box test showed positive serial correlation in the T_mean and T_max series for all of the stations at the 0.05 significance level. In the monthly series, the significant warming trends in the T_mean series were more perceptible than the same ones in T_max series; however, T_max trend was found more than T_min series. The Mann–Whitney (MW) test detected a significance upward shift changes in the annual T_mean, T_max and T_min series of about 86, 73 and 80 % of the stations, respectively. The average magnitude of significant warming trends in annual T_mean, T_max and T_min series were (+) 0.58 °C, (+) 0.52 °C and (+) 0.69 °C per decade, respectively. Furthermore, the interpolation maps showed that warming trends in the east and west of Urmia Lake were more than southern area. Therefore, the results showed that the basin has suffered from increasing trends in the T_mean, T_max and T_min over the recent decades. Finally, significant changes were found in 1980s and 1990s based on the Mann-Kendall ranks and change point tests. In this study, it is interesting that the period of significant changes in warming trends were close to the beginning of decreasing water level of the Lake.     

The effect of nano-size additives on the electrical conductivity of matrix suspension and properties of self-flowing low-cement high alumina refractory castables

Influence of two nano-size additives on electrical properties of suspension matrix of self-flowing low-cement high alumina refractory castable is investigated. For this purpose, castament FS 10 and FS 20 on the basis of polycarboxylate ether were considered. The self-flow value, workability and mechanical strength of the castable are evaluated and their relations with electrical conductivity are determined. Using these relations, the type and optimum amount of proper additive for these refractory castables are determined. It was shown that if the electrical conductivity of matrix suspension is less than 0.71 mS/cm, high alumina low-cement self-flowing refractory castable can be obtained. The best self-flow, sufficient working time and adequate mechanical strength in the castables are obtained with 0.08 wt.% FS 20.     

A new adaptation of mapping method to study mixing of multiphase flows in mixers with complex geometries

The main objective of the present work is to modify the traditional mapping method for the simulation of distributive mixing of multiphase flows in geometries involving moving parts such as, internal mixers or twin-screw extruders without a limitation on their geometrical periodicity. The periodicity condition, limits the results of traditional mapping method to tracking mapping mesh between specific discrete time intervals or distances for that geometry is repeated, hence, result is only for fixed orientation of rotors. Imaginary domain method is introduced to track mapping mesh from one state to the next free of geometrical periodicity limitations. In this work the method is introduced and its applicability and accuracy is discussed in details. A two-dimensional (2D) simulation of mixing of two Newtonian fluids with different viscosities in an intermeshing internal mixer is used as a test case study. In this example the key issues of ability to predict mixing state in details for all orientations of rotors is presented. To reduce diffusion errors of mapping method in the boundaries of the rotors, mapping mesh refinement technique that relies upon one single reference mesh is also presented.     

Succinct representation of dynamic trees

We study the problem of maintaining a dynamic ordered tree succinctly under updates of the following form: insertion or deletion of a leaf, insertion of a node on an edge (edge subdivision) or deletion of a node with only one child (the child becomes a child of its former grandparent). We allow satellite data of a fixed size to be associated to the nodes of the tree.We support update operations in constant amortized time and support access to satellite data and basic navigation operations in worst-case constant time; the basic navigation operations include parent, first/last-child, previous/next-child. These operations are moving from a node to its parent, leftmost/rightmost child, and its previous and next child respectively.We demonstrate that to efficiently support more extended operations, such as determining the i-th child of a node, rank of a child among its siblings, or size of the subtree rooted at a node, one requires a restrictive pattern for update strategy, for which we propose the finger-update model. In this model, updates are performed at the location of a finger that is only allowed to crawl on the tree between a child and a parent or between consecutive siblings. Under this model, we describe how the named extended operations are performed in worst-case constant time.Previous work on dynamic succinct trees (Munro et al., 2001 [17]; Raman and Rao, 2003 [19]) is mainly restricted to binary trees and achieves poly-logarithmic (Munro et al., 2001 [17]) or “poly-log-log” (Raman and Rao, 2003 [19]) update time under a more restricted model, where updates are performed in traversals starting at the root and ending at the root and queries can be answered when the traversal is completed. A previous result on ordinal trees achieves only sublinear amortized update time and “poly-log-log” query time (Gupta et al., 2007 [11]). More recently, the update time has been improved to O(logn/loglogn) while queries can be performed in O(logn/loglogn) time (Sadakane and Navarro, 2010 [20]).