Volatile compounds of original African black and white shea butter from Tchad and Cameroon

Shea butter is used as an edible vegetable fat in many African countries. It can be utilized as a substitute or complete replacement for cocoa butter in various applications and plays an important role in traditional African medicinal practice. Although detection of volatile compounds by solid‐phase micro‐extraction gas‐chromatography mass‐spectroscopy (SPME‐GC‐MS) is a very reliable and reproducible technique, which can be used as an important part of authenticity checking, production monitoring and contamination detection, no published data about volatile compounds of shea butter are available so far. In this investigation, the characteristic volatiles in the headspace of original African shea butter samples were identified by using SPME‐capillary‐GC coupled to a mass selective detector. Almost 100 different volatile components were identified, e.g. fatty acids, saturated and unsaturated aldehydes and ketones, terpenes, and typical Maillard reaction products such as methylfuranes and pyrazines. Furthermore, the samples have been olfactorily evaluated by a panel of professional flavorists and trained analytical chemists. It can be stated that variations in processing conditions of shea butter result in considerable differences in the composition of headspace volatiles, detected by SPME‐GC‐MS and human olfaction.     

Hydrodynamics of gas fluidized beds with mixture of group D and B particles

The dynamics of a gas‐solid fluidized bed containing Geldart Group D particles mixed with a small proportion of Geldart Group B particles are investigated using pressure fluctuations data. Time series analysis, using a variety of nonlinear dynamics tools, shows that the slugging present with Group D particles can be suppressed by the addition of a small proportion of Group B particles. The power spectra and the auto‐correlation function are used for a preliminary evaluation of dominant slug frequencies. It is shown that the bed fluidized with the mixture of Group D and B particles behaves in a less periodic manner and is dominated by more random bubble motion. On the other hand, the correlation integral is used to analyze the chaotic behaviour of the flow, through evaluation of the fractal structure of the reconstructed attractors. It is shown that the bed fluidized with Group D particles is characterized by a combination of steady slug motion and irregular particles motion. The behaviour of the fluidized bed of Group D/B particles mixture is characterized by a single correlation dimension for a wide range of fluidization velocities.     

MIRRE approach: nonlinear and multimodal exploration of MIR aggregated search results

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Nowadays, web users frequently explore multimedia contents to satisfy their information needs. The exploration approaches usually provide linear interaction...     

A novel secure solution of using mixed reality in data transmission for bowel and jaw surgical telepresence: enhanced rivest cipher RC6 block cipher

Security threats are crucial challenges that deter Mixed reality (MR) communication in medical telepresence. This research aims to improve the security by reducing the chances of types of various attacks occurring during the real-time data transmission in surgical telepresence as well as reduce the time of the cryptographic algorithm and keep the quality of the media used. The proposed model consists of an enhanced RC6 algorithm in combination. Dynamic keys are generated from the RC6 algorithm mixed with RC4 to create dynamic S-box and permutation table, preventing various known attacks during the real-time data transmission. For every next session, a new key is created, avoiding possible reuse of the same key from the attacker. The results obtained from our proposed system are showing better performance compared to the state of art. The resistance to the tested attacks is measured throughout the entropy, Pick to Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR) is decreased for the encrypted image than the state of art, structural similarity index (SSIM) closer to zero. The execution time of the algorithm is decreased for an average of 20%. The proposed system is focusing on preventing the brute force attack occurred during the surgical telepresence data transmission. The paper proposes a framework that enhances the security related to data transmission during surgeries with acceptable performance.

     

PCA-DTT 2D-DHCES based attack resilient imperceptible image watermarking

Most schemes exhibit low robustness due to LSB’s (Least Significant Bit) and MSB’s (Most Significant Bit) based information hiding in the cover image. However, most of these IW schemes have low imperceptibility as the cover image distortion reveals to the attacker due to information hiding in MSB’s. In this paper, a hybrid image watermarking scheme is proposed based on integrating Robust Principal Component Analysis (R-PCA), Discrete Tchebichef Transform (DTT), and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). A grayscale watermark image is twisted/scrambled using a 2D Discrete Hyper-chaotic Encryption System (2D-DHCES) to boost up the robustness/heftiness and security. The original cover image is crumbled into sparse components using R-PCA and using DTT the substantial component is additionally decomposed and the watermark will be embedded in the cover image using SVD processing. In DTT, scarcer coefficients hold the utmost energy, also provide an optimum sparse depiction of the substantial image edges and features that supports proficient retrieval of the watermark image even after unadorned image distortion based channel attacks. The imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed method are corroborated against a variety of signal processing channel attacks (salt and pepper noise, multi-directional shearing, cropping, and frequency filtering, etc.). The visual and quantifiable outcomes reveal that the proposed image watermarking scheme is much effective and delivers high forbearance against several image processing and geometric attacks.

     

Biomathematical study of time-dependent flow of a Carreau nanofluid through inclined catheterized arteries with overlapping stenosis

Journal of Central South University - This work is concerned with the analysis of blood flow through inclined catheterized arteries having a balloon (angioplasty) with time-variant overlapping...     

Single phase multi color emitting Ca2LuTaO6: Dy3+/Eu3+ double perovskite oxide phosphors

The trivalent rare-earth (RE³⁺) doped phosphors show tremendous achievement in narrow band multicolor line emission for various applications. However, the 4f–4f absorption transition of these ions is forbidden in UV and blue light excitation. Usually, a sensitizer having spin allowed transition was used as a co-dopant to excite these ions via the energy transfer phenomenon. Another approach promisingly using to excite these ions by efficient energy transfer from the intrinsic emission of the Ca₂LuTaO₆ double perovskite phosphors host lattice. Phosphors of Ca₂LuTaO₆ with double perovskite structure were synthesized by using a high-temperature solid-state reaction method. The produced Ca₂LuTaO₆ double perovskite phosphors show an intrinsic broad band emission centered at 424 nm under the excitation of 313 nm UV light. The origin of this broad band blue emission was deeply investigated by using computation and experimental approaches. The trivalent activator Dy³⁺ and Eu³⁺ were doped is a single and co-dopant in the produced Ca₂LuTaO₆ phosphors to check their excitation in UV and near-UV spectral region. X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy were used to investigate the structure and phase analysis. Various characterizations such as photoluminescence excitation, emission, and CIE chromaticity coordinates were measured which illustrate the potential of Dy³⁺ and Eu³⁺ activated Ca₂LuTaO₆ double perovskite phosphors for narrow band multicolor line emission for various applications.     

Surface Modification of Ready-to-Use Hollow Fiber Ultrafiltration Modules for Oil/Water Separation

Reusing wastewater from oil-related industries is becoming increasingly important, especially in water-stressed oil-producing countries. Before oily wastewater can be discharged or reused, it must be properly treated, e.g., by membrane-based processes like ultrafiltration. A major issue of the applied membranes is their high fouling propensity. This paper reports on mitigating fouling inside ready-to-use ultrafiltration hollow-fiber modules used in a polishing step in oil/water separation. For this purpose, in-situ polyzwitterionic hydrogel coating was applied. The membrane performance was tested with oil nano-emulsions using a mini-plant system. The main factors influencing fouling were systematically investigated using statistical design of experiments.     

Synthesis and characterization of photopolymerizable hydrogels based on poly (ethylene glycol) for biomedical applications

Hydrogels are polymeric materials widely used in medicine due to their similarity with the biological components of the body. Hydrogels are biocompatible materials that have the potential to promote cell proliferation and tissue support because of their hydrophilic nature, porous structure, and elastic mechanical properties. In this work, we demonstrate the microwave-assisted synthesis of three molecular weight varieties of poly(ethylene glycol) dimethacrylate (PEGDMA) with different mechanical and thermal properties and the rapid photo of them using 1-hydroxy-cyclohexyl-phenyl-ketone (Irgacure 184) as UV photoinitiator. The effects of the poly(ethylene glycol) molecular weight and degree of acrylation on swelling, mechanical, and rheological properties of hydrogels were investigated. The biodegradability of the PEGDMA hydrogels, as well as the ability to grow and proliferate cells, was examined for its viability as a scaffold in tissue engineering. Altogether, the biomaterial hydrogel properties open the way for applications in the field of regenerative medicine for functional scaffolds and tissues.     

Ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene with improved crosslink density,oxidation stability,and microbial inhibition by chemical crosslinking and tea polyphenols for total joint replacements

Highly crosslinked ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) stabilized by vitamin E (VE) is widely applied in artificial joints as the bearings. Despite the approval, there is a discord that VE lowers the crosslinking efficiency, limiting its use at high concentration. In this work, we aim to obtain highly crosslinked and oxidation resistant UHMWPE through the conjunction of tea polyphenol and chemical crosslinking. We hypothesized that highly incorporated tea polyphenol with multiple reactive sites can ameliorate crosslinking efficiency of chemical crosslinked UHMWPE in comparison to VE. Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) as representative tea polyphenol was incorporated into UHMWPE at high concentration (2–8 wt%), followed by chemical crosslinking with 2 wt% organic peroxide. Unlike VE/UHMWPE blends as the control, chemical crosslinking achieved an increasing trend in crosslink density of EGCG/UHMWPE blends with increasing antioxidant concentration. High concentration of EGCG also enhanced the oxidation stability of UHMWPE. Intriguingly, EGCG endowed UHMWPE with an excellent antimicrobial property, which was inefficient in VE/UHMWPE. Cell viability was hardly affected by the high loaded antioxidant and peroxide. The chemically crosslinked UHMWPE blended with EGCG is proved to be a reasonable, cost effective and realistic alternative for use in artificial joints.