THREE TYPES OF CITRUS PEEL WASTE AS SOURCES OF COLOR

SUMMARY –Pilot-scale extractions of orange peel color concentrates from whole peel, peel frits and flavedo were reported. Yields of color up to 402, 545 and 669 mg/kg of starting material were obtained from frits, whole peel and flavedo, respectively. Additional color was obtained by acetone treatment of emulsion and this process increased yields by 1% from whole peel, 33% from flavedo and 50% from frits. All three of these waste materials appear to provide good sources of natural orange color. From the standpoint of yield, flavedo was best. Whole peel, although affording the lowest yield of color, offers the advantage of being considerably easier to handle due to lack of emulsion.     

Authors' reply

The appeal to "classical vocabulary" made by Lecourtier and Walter is not convincing. However, two of their other criticisms are appealing and we have accordingly modified our definitions in the interest of clarity and precision.     

Chemical evaluation of oil from field-and storage-damaged soybeans

In recent years, prolonged wet weather during the harvest season resulted in excessive field- and storagedamaged soybeans, particularly in the Southeast. As the severity of the damage increased, analysis of the oil extracted from these beans showed a corresponding increase in free fatty acids, Lovibond color, and content of oxidative deterioration products which absorb at 270 nm. In general, there was a substantial decrease in total oil content and an almost complete deterioration of phospholipids in severely damaged beans during storage. Initially, the oxidative stability of the oils decreased rapidly. After storage damage became severe, the stability increased substantially, possibly because of the formation of unidentified deterioration products which had high antioxidant properties. The study clearly showed that the processing of field- and storage-damaged soybeans would result in substantial refining losses to processors and that the finished oil would be of inferior quality. ARS, USDA     

Mean-Life Indifference Pricing for Quantity Purchases

Traditionally, consumers pay a fixed price for a quantity of items based on a presumed mean life. In many cases (i.e., federal government procurement) a sample of items is pretested to determine mean life and hence conformance to the contract. This paper suggests an alternative scheme based on a price indifference curve h(φ) which specifies the unit cost given mean life φ, which is estimated based on the actual performance of the first r items that fail. The paper develops a specific form for the indifference function and a procedure for estimating both φ and h(φ) and presents an example.     

Distributed model predictive control of an experimental four-tank system

A distributed model predictive control (DMPC) framework is proposed. The physical plant structure and the plant mathematical model are used to partition the system into self-sufficient estimation and control nodes. Local measurements at the nodes are used to estimate the relevant plant states. This information is then used in the model predictive control calculations. Communication among relevant nodes during estimation and control calculations provides improvement over the performance of completely decentralized controllers. The DMPC framework is demonstrated for the level control of an experimental four-tank system. The performance of the DMPC system for disturbance rejection is compared with other control configurations. The results indicate that the proposed framework provides significant improvement over completely decentralized MPC controllers, and approaches the performance of a fully centralized design.     

Mapping snow cover in the pan-Arctic zone,using multi-year (1998-2001) images from optical VEGETATION sensor

Timely information on spatial distribution and temporal dynamics of snow cover in the pan-Arctic zone is needed, as snow cover plays an important role in climate, hydrology and ecological processes. Here we report estimates of snow cover in the pan-Arctic zone (north of 45° N) at 1-km spatial resolution and at a 10-day temporal interval over the period of April 1998 to December 2001, using 10-day composite images of VEGETATION sensor onboard Système Pour l'Observation de la Terre (SPOT)-4 satellite. The results show that snow covered area (SCA) in North America (north of 45° N) increased from 1998 to 2001, while SCA in Eurasia (north of 45° N) decreased from 1998 to 2000 but increased in 2001. There were large spatial and temporal variations of snow cover in the pan-Arctic zone during 1998-2001.     

An Empirical Study on the Performance of Java/.Net Cryptographic APIs

ABSTRACT

The unprecedented growing demands on security and privacy protection ushered the proliferation of cryptographic tools. This article presents a study on the performance comparison of cryptographic Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that are implemented for the Java and the .Net frameworks. The results of the study clearly indicate the superiority of a set of commercial cryptographic APIs over its open-source counterpart.     

Esterification kinetics in titanium isopropoxide-acetic acid solutions

FTIR observation has been used to analyze the reaction between titanium isopropoxide and acetic acid under a variety of conditions. Isopropyl acetate ester forms in these mixtures and serves as an indicator of the extent of condensation between the titanium precursors. Condensation occurs to a gradually increasing extent to form a broad spectrum of titanium oxo-acetate polymers. The temperature dependence of the time to reach observable precipitation in these solutions has also been mapped out. The activation energy for this process was found to be 0.7 eV. The precipitation times have a direct bearing on how these solutions can be used when making a wide variety of titanium containing sol-gel solutions.     

Improvement in hot carrier lifetime as a function of N2ion implantation before gate oxide growth in deep submicron NMOS devices

A detailed study of the impact of N₂ ion implantation (I/I) dose before gate oxide growth to hot carrier (HC) reliability of NMOSFETs is reported here, Improvements of more than 20× in HC lifetime were achieved by the introduction of sufficiently high N₂ (I/I) doses. It was found that for NMOSFETs, the HC degradation correlates inversely to the initial interface state density introduced by the N₂ I/I process. This process-driven HC lifetime improvement does not require extensive post-metal anneals for HC lifetime improvements in advanced CMOS multilevel metal-dielectric processes