Impact of Pre-Ozonation on Mechanical Properties of Selected Genotypes of Cucumber Fruits During the Souring Process

Cucumber souring is a process mediated by a microorganisms present on the surface of cucumber fruits. Sour pickles are fresh cucumbers that have been poured over with a sodium chloride solution and various types of spices. In the present research, pre-ozonated and control cucumber fruits were subjected to the souring processes. It was observed that ozone treatment had no negative impact on the quality of the fruit before the souring process. Moreover, sour pickles after pre-ozonation had better mechanic and sensory properties than the control.     

Numerical investigation of coal gasification in supercritical water with the ReaxFF molecular dynamics method

Studies on the coal gasification process in supercritical water (SCW) were carried out with the ReaxFF molecular dynamics (MD) method, in which the Wiser model of the coal molecule was adopted. The results show that hydrogen production increases with increase of temperature and water–coal mass ratio. It is also found that the coal molecule breaks into small fragments before it reacts with water molecules. The detailed chemical reactions and pathways of hydrogen generation during the gasification process are disclosed. H ions are found to be the main source of hydrogen generation, and C–H–O compounds or radicals are the most essential reactants throughout the reactions producing H₂ and H ions. OH ions can significantly accelerate the oxidization of organic fragments to produce C–H–O compounds and radicals, which explains how catalysts of alkali salts such as NaOH and KOH improve hydrogen production.     

Robust H∞ Control of Uncertain Stochastic Systems with Time-varying Interval Delays

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - A robust delay-dependent stability criterion for discrete-time uncertain stochastic systems is proposed to achieve asymptotical stability...     

Piezoelectric properties of (Na1−xKx)NbO3‐based lead‐free piezoelectric ceramics and their application in knocking sensor

Piezoelectric knocking sensors with a dense microstructure were fabricated at 960°C for 2 hours using various CuO‐added (Na_0.5K_0.5)NbO₃ (NKN)‐based piezoelectric ceramics. The practical sensitivity (S_P) of the knocking sensor, which is the ability to detect the knocking of a car engine, was influenced by the g₃₃ × k_p value of the piezoelectric ceramics, indicating that the g₃₃ × k_p can be considered a figure of merit of the piezoelectric ceramics used in the knocking sensor. The knocking sensor synthesized using the CuO‐added 0.95(Na_0.5K_0.5)(Nb_0.95Sb_0.05)O₃–0.05CaTiO₃ (CNKNS–CT) ceramic, which showed a g₃₃ of 25.7 Vm/N and k_p of 0.46, exhibited a high S_P of 119 mV/g at the resonance frequency. The S_P of the commercial knocking sensor, which was synthesized using the Pb(Zr,Ti)O₃ (PZT)‐based ceramic, was 112 mV/g at the resonance frequency. Hence, the knocking sensor fabricated using the CNKNS–CT piezoelectric ceramic can be used to replace the commercial PZT‐based knocking sensor.     

Ensemble-based regression analysis of multimodal medical data for osteopenia diagnosis

Areal bone mineral density (aBMD) is used in clinical practice to diagnose osteoporosis. In previous studies, aBMD was estimated from diagnostic computed tomography (dCT) images, but a battery of medical tests was also taken that can be used to improve the regression performance. However, it is difficult to exploit the multimodal data as the additional features have poor informativeness and may lead to overfitting. An ensemble-based framework is proposed to improve the regression accuracy and robustness on multimodal medical data with a high relative dimensionality. Instead of case-wise bootstrap aggregating, a filtering-based metalearner scheme was employed to build feature-wise ensembles. The proposed approach was evaluated on clinical data and was found to be superior to bagging and other ensemble methods. The feature-wise ensembling approach can also be used to automatically determine if any multimodal features are related to bone mineral density. Several blood measurements were identified to be linked with bone mineral density, and a literature search supported the automatic identification results.     

A note on the isomorphism of Cartesian products of ergodic flows

We show an isomorphism stability property for Cartesian products of either flows with joining primeness property or flows which are ??-weakly mixing.     

Non-monotonic behaviors of laminar burning velocities of H2/O2/He mixtures at elevated pressures and temperatures

Both experimental and calculated laminar burning velocities of H₂/O₂/He mixtures were obtained, with equivalence ratios of 0.6–4.0, initial pressures of 0.1 MPa–0.5 MPa, initial temperature of 373 K, and dilution ratio of 7.0. Laminar burning velocities changed non-monotonically with the increasing initial pressures at equivalence ratios of 1.0–3.0. The decrease of overall reaction orders can explain the non-monotonic relationship between the laminar burning velocities and initial pressures. Consumption and production of both H and HO₂ radicals were also obtained to explain the decrease of overall reaction order. The competition of H and HO₂ radical between elemental reactions were also discussed. The three body reaction R15 (H + O₂(+M) = HO₂(+M)) gained more H radical in the competition with R1 (H + O₂ = O + OH), producing more HO₂ radical. Through the reaction pathway analysis, the restraint in production of both OH and H leaded to a reducing radical pool. The poorer reaction pool would restrain the overall reaction and lead to the reduction of overall reaction order and the non-monotonic behavior of the laminar burning velocity.