KINETICS OF BIOETHANOL PRODUCTION FROM WHEAT MILLING BY-PRODUCTS

An overview of the potential application of wheat milling by‐products as substrate for bioethanol production is presented. In order to select a suitable microorganism, model fermentations were conducted using glucose and dry baker's yeast. The overall ethanol yield was nearly stable (ca. 0.35 g/g), independent of mash glucose concentration; mashes with 100 g glucose/L resulted in an overall ethanol productivity of 3.48 g/L·h. Slurries containing low‐grade wheat flour (LG) (100, 200 or 300 g/L) were used for simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) with Zymomonas mobilis. Fermentation performance was evaluated based on ethanol concentration (P), productivity (Q_v), yield (Y_P/S), production rate (Q_p) and glucose consumption rate (Q_s). Mashes containing 200 g LG/L produced about 52 g ethanol/L, with Q_vof 2.17 g/L·h. Based on the relatively high fermentation rate of LG, reaching peak ethanol productivity within ca. 9 h of SSF, considerable savings on fermentation time was achieved. Using Z. mobilis for LG fermentation, P was about 30% higher than that obtained with Saccharomyces cerevisiae.     

Automated system for characterization and classification of malaria‐infected stages using light microscopic images of thin blood smears

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive image characterization cum classification framework for malaria‐infected stage detection using microscopic images of thin blood smears. The methodology mainly includes microscopic imaging of Leishman stained blood slides, noise reduction and illumination correction, erythrocyte segmentation, feature selection followed by machine classification. Amongst three‐image segmentation algorithms (namely, rule‐based, Chan–Vese‐based and marker‐controlled watershed methods), marker‐controlled watershed technique provides better boundary detection of erythrocytes specially in overlapping situations. Microscopic features at intensity, texture and morphology levels are extracted to discriminate infected and noninfected erythrocytes. In order to achieve subgroup of potential features, feature selection techniques, namely, F‐statistic and information gain criteria are considered here for ranking. Finally, five different classifiers, namely, Naive Bayes, multilayer perceptron neural network, logistic regression, classification and regression tree (CART), RBF neural network have been trained and tested by 888 erythrocytes (infected and noninfected) for each features’ subset. Performance evaluation of the proposed methodology shows that multilayer perceptron network provides higher accuracy for malaria‐infected erythrocytes recognition and infected stage classification. Results show that top 90 features ranked by F‐statistic (specificity: 98.64%, sensitivity: 100%, PPV: 99.73% and overall accuracy: 96.84%) and top 60 features ranked by information gain provides better results (specificity: 97.29%, sensitivity: 100%, PPV: 99.46% and overall accuracy: 96.73%) for malaria‐infected stage classification.     

采用粗空心微球低压粉末冶金法制备空心微球复合泡沫钛(英文)

在低压下采用粉末冶金法,使用粗尺寸空心微球制备出不同相对密度的钛空心微球复合泡沫材料。在压力为60~70 MPa,通过冷压制备得到不同相对密度的泡沫钛。研究冷压压力与空心微球破碎倾向和相对密度的函数关系。研究制备的泡沫钛材料的压缩变形行为,考虑到实际应用,建立了平台应力、弹性模量、致密化应变和能量吸收之间的经验关系。对比泡沫钛和致密钛的性能指标,发现在工程应用中泡沫钛是致密钛的优秀替代物。     

Role of carrier material in encapsulation of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) by spray drying

ABSTRACT

Yeast was encapsulated using different carrier materials and their combinations to explore the possible synergistic effect of carrier material during encapsulation using spray drying. Freeze-drying was performed for comparison. The dried cell powders were analyzed for the quality aspects (morphology, flowability, and storage stability). The best results were observed, with a combination of whey protein and corn starch (cell survival: 82.37% and yield: 56%, w/w) with a shelf life of 6 months (with only 10% reduction in cell survival). The survival was found to be 40% without any carrier material, which decreased to less than 25% within 4 weeks.     

Textural pattern classification for oral squamous cell carcinoma

Despite being an area of cancer with highest worldwide incidence, oral cancer yet remains to be widely researched. Studies on computer‐aided analysis of pathological slides of oral cancer contribute a lot to the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Some researches in this direction have been carried out on oral submucous fibrosis. In this work an approach for analysing abnormality based on textural features present in squamous cell carcinoma histological slides have been considered. Histogram and grey‐level co‐occurrence matrix approaches for extraction of textural features from biopsy images with normal and malignant cells are used here. Further, we have used linear support vector machine classifier for automated diagnosis of the oral cancer, which gives 100% accuracy.     

ZnO nanostructure thin films by continuous spray pyrolysis using doped precursor for Si solar cell application

This work presents deposition of Zn solution seed layer assisted growth of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanostructure layers by continuous spray pyrolysis reactor using lanthanides (Er and Eu) and metal (Al) influenced zinc acetate precursor solution. Dopants in precursors have influenced structural property, surface morphology and optical reflectance of resulting ZnO thin films which are supported by X-ray diffractometer, scanning electron microscope and reflectance measurements. Enhanced dispersion amongst nanorods is observed under the influence of Er and Al dopant in ZnO thin film. The change of precursor from Zinc acetate to Titanium tetraisopropoxide for Er doped precursor is helping to achieve better crystalline ZnO nanorods arrangement with increased homogenous growth, which results into improved light reflectance reduction of thin film. The experimental evidences of light reflectance from ZnO nanorods on Si surface is studied with the help of FDTD based Lumerical software package which can be a useful study for designing ZnO nanorods thin film in device purposes. The utility of ZnO layer by this reactor on low efficiency Si solar cell is also explored in improving device efficiency via increase of photocurrent.     

Self-propagating high temperature synthesis (SHS) of titanium carbide

Abstracts are not published in this journal This revised version was published online in November 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Effect of zinc on the electrocrystallization of cobalt

The effects of zinc on the current efficiency, power consumption, deposit quality and contamination of cathode deposit during electrocrystallization of cobalt were studied. The presence of zinc affected current efficiency at all temperatures and the effect was intensified at lower temperature. Increase in power consumption was significant at lower temperature. The quantity of zinc in the electrodeposited cobalt invariably increased with increase in zinc concentration in the electrolyte, however, the zinc content of the deposit was significantly low at higher temperature. The tolerance limit of zinc in the electrolyte with respect to deposit quality was also greater at higher temperature. Increase in current density decreased the current efficiency, increased the power consumption and lowered the cathode contamination.