Comparison of quality and shelf life of buffalo meat patties stored at refrigeration temperature

Scientific investigation on the quality changes of processed meat products will boost and sustain the meat production and utilization in buffalo abundant countries. A programme was undertaken to compare the quality of buffalo meat patties made from intensively reared young male, semi extensively reared spent male and female groups and stored at refrigeration temperature (4 ± 1 °C). Buffalo meat patties were evaluated for shelf life attributes by analysing the changes in physicochemical, microbiological and sensory attributes. The overall acceptability of patties was better in spent buffalo group than young male group. Increasing storage time resulted in significantly higher pH, TBARS, total aerobic mesophils, coliforms, Staphylococcus aureus and psychrophilic counts but decreased appearance, flavour, juiciness, tenderness, connective tissue residue and overall acceptability scores of buffalo meat patties. The patties were well acceptable within 20 days in young male group and 25 days in spent buffalo group respectively during refrigerator storage.     

Clay catalysed nitrodecarboxylation of aromatic acids

Nitration ofp-anisic acid in clay microenvironment yields 2,4-dinitroanisole in about 40–60% yield, in addition to the conventional nitration product, namely 3-nitro-4-methoxybenzoic acid. While clay directed nitration ofp-methoxyacetophenone gives only 3-nitro-4-methoxy-acetophenone, withm-nitrobenzoic acid, nitrodecarboxylation yieldingm-dinitrobenzene is the only reaction course. The observed greater ipso-nitration facilitated by a nitro group may be attributed to the greater ease with which the Wheland intermediate may decompose via a cyclic six-membered transition state.     

Evolutionary multiobjective optimization of cellular base station locations using modified NSGA-II

In this paper, various parameters of cellular base station (BS) placement problem such as site coordinates, transmitting power, height and tilt angle are determined using evolutionary multiobjective algorithm to obtain better compromised solutions. The maximization of service coverage and minimization of cost are considered as conflicting objectives by satisfying inequality constraints such as handover, traffic demand and overlap. For the purpose of simulation, a 15 × 15 Km² synthetic test system is discretized as hexagonal cell structure and necessary simulations are carried out to calculate receiving field strength at various points. The path loss is calculated using Hata model. To improve the diversity and uniformity of the obtained nondominated solutions, controlled elitism and dynamic crowding distance operators are introduced in non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) and are designated as modified NSGA-II (MNSGA-II). The optimal placement for BS is determined using MNSGA-II and NSGA-II. The effect of maximum number of function evaluations, handover and overlap on the performances of the algorithms is studied. A better distributed Pareto-front is obtained in MNSGA- II when compared with NSGA- II. The results reveal that, increasing of overlap percentage not only increases the coverage but also increases the overlap and handover error. The coverage percentage is indirectly proportional to the number of antennas involved in the handover constraint. The simulation results reveal that the proposed technique is more suitable for real-world BS placement problem.     

Thermal comparison between ceiling diffusers and fabric ductwork diffusers for green buildings

Continuously increasing energy standards have driven the need for increasing the efficiency of buildings. Most enhancements to building efficiency have been a result of changes to the heating/cooling systems, improvements in construction materials, or building design code improvements. These approaches neglect the way in which air is dispersed into individual rooms or in a building – i.e., the ducting system. This opens up the possibility of significant energy savings by making ductwork systems lighter and better insulating while ensuring cost effectiveness.The current study explores this idea by comparing the performance of conventional ductwork with recent advancements in fabric-based ductwork. We focus on the transient behavior of an on/off control system, as well as the steady state behavior of the two ductwork systems. Transient, fully three dimensional validated computational (CFD) simulations are performed to determine flow patterns and thermal evolution in rooms containing either conventional or fabric ductwork. This analysis is used to construct metrics on efficiency. A number of different flow rates are examined to determine the performance over a range of operating conditions. Transient finite volume simulations consisted of over 13 million degrees of freedom for over 10,000 time steps. The simulations utilized HPC (High Performance Computing) for the large scale analysis.The results conclusively show that fabric ducting systems are superior to the conventional systems in terms of efficiency. Observations from the data show that fabric ducting systems heat the room faster, more uniformly, and more efficiently. The increase in performance demonstrates the potential benefits of moving away from conventional systems to fabric systems for the construction of green buildings: particularly in conjunction with adaptive control systems.