Preface

The evaluation of contact forces during an impact requires the use of continuous force-based methods. An accurate prediction of the impact force demands the identification of the contact parameters on a case-by-case basis. In this paper, the preimpact effective kinetic energy \(T_{c}^{-}\) is put forward as an indicator of the intensity of the impact force along the contact normal direction. This represents a part of the total kinetic energy of the system that is associated with the subspace of constrained motion defined by the impact constraints at the moment of contact onset. Its value depends only on the mechanical parameters and the configuration of the system. We illustrate in this paper that this indicator can be used to characterize the impact force intensity. The suitability of this indicator is confirmed by numerical simulations and experiments.     

Color and texture applied to a signature-based bag of visual words method for image retrieval

Multimedia Tools and Applications - This article addresses the problem of representation, indexing and retrieval of images through the signature-based bag of visual words (S-BoVW) paradigm, which...     

Optimization study of soybean intermittent drying in fixed-bed drying technology

Intermittent drying of materials is an alternative operation that aims at reducing energy consumption, improve the preservation of dried products or decrease effective drying time. Intermittent drying supplies the system with time-varying input air properties that are opposite to traditional operations, where air properties are constant at the dryer inlet. The major objective of this study is to establish the most satisfactory patterns of air temperature and velocity modulation at the dryer entrance to reduce energy consumption. This optimization study was based on a heterogeneous model for the drying of grains in fixed bed validated with experimental data. Intermittent and conventional operation experiments were conducted using equal energy consumption, and the influence of air temperature and velocity modulation on the drying rates related to the percentage of evaporated water were assessed. Results indicated that higher drying rates can be achieved under intermittent operation, and the validated model based on these results could reasonably predict temperature and moisture content profiles. Simulations pointed out that the best modulation patterns of air properties is a function of a variety of system conditions such as initial temperature and moisture content of both soybean and drying air. However, a tendency to reduce energy consumption was observed when the system operation is initially at high temperature and constantly at low velocity.     

Recipe analysis for knowledge discovery of gastronomic dishes

The Internet plays an important role in society as a whole. One of the services that arose from the Internet was collaborative systems, in which several users create the content of the systems by means of personal experiences. One of the many collaborative systems existing today is those of sharing gastronomic recipes. The area of information retrieval on the Web has increased interest in regard to recovering the information contained in this environment and studying it in order to identify relationships such as the ingredients used in the preparation of a dish, which can be identified through the use of textual data mining techniques. In this scope, the present work proposes a methodology of knowledge discovery in gastronomic recipes collected from various sources of data. For this, information such as the ingredients, quantities, units of measure, preparation directions and other characteristics associated with the recipes is used. With the results found in the experiments presented in this article, this work represents a first step for the development of a service that, besides aggregating recipes from various sources, explores the collective knowledge that can be discovered when analyzing hundreds of thousands of recipes available on the Internet.

     

Cauchy with whale optimizer based eagle strategy for multi-level color hematology image segmentation

Neural Computing and Applications - Pathological color image segmentation is an exigent procedure due to the existence of imperceptibly correlated, and indistinct multiple regions of concern....     

A first report of the complexes of 5,11,17,23-tetra-tert-butyl-25,27-diethoxycarboxymethoxy-26,28-dihydroxycalix[4]arene with Mn(II), Fe(III), Co(II), Ni(II), Cu(II) and Zn(II)

Totally six dinuclear complexes of Mn(II), Fe(III), Co(II), Ni(II), Cu(II) and Zn(II) of calix[4]arene derivatized with two pendants possessing terminal –COOH functions at two of its alternate phenolic –OH groups were synthesized for the first time and were well characterized.