Kinetic modelling of textural changes in ready-to-eat breakfast cereals during soaking in semi-skimmed milk

Summary Ready‐to‐eat breakfast cereals immersed in milk undergo undesirable changes in texture because of sudden moisture uptake. The textural changes are ascribable to a plasticizing effect of water, which modifies the mechanical strength of products by softening the starch/protein matrix. In this work, some textural parameters of different cereal flakes were derived from the force–displacement curves monitored during 300 s of immersion in milk. Hardness loss, deformability increment and changes in the force–displacement curve profile were calculated and plotted against soaking time. The application of a sugar coating process to a model cereal flake increased the initial product hardness and improved the preservation of the textural parameters during immersion. The Peleg model closely fitted the experimental data, with regression coefficients from 0.967 to 0.999.     

The making of the MCM/70 microcomputer

MCM/70, manufactured by Micro Computer Machines (MCM), was a small desktop microcomputer designed to provide the APL programming language environment for business, scientific, and educational use. MCM was among the first companies to fully recognize and act upon microprocessor technology's immense potential for developing a new generation of cost-effective computing systems. This article discusses the pioneering work on personal microcomputers conducted at MCM in the early 1970s and, in particular, the making of the MCM/70 microcomputer.     

Shear mode coupling and tilted grain growth of A1N thin films in BAW resonators.

Polycrystalline A1N thin films were deposited by RF reactive magnetron sputtering on Pt(111)/Ti electrode films. The substrates were tilted by an angle ranging from 40 degrees to 70 degrees with respect to the target normal. A low deposition temperature and a high sputter gas pressure were found ideal for tilted growth. The resulting grain tilt angle amounts to about half the substrate tilt angle. For coupling evaluation, 5 GHz solidly mounted resonator structures have been realized. The tilted grain A1N films exhibited a permittivity in the 9.5-10.5 range and loss tangent of 0.3%. Two shear modes as well as the longitudinal mode could be clearly identified. The coupling coefficient k2(eff) of the fundamental thickness shear mode (TS0) was found to be about 0.5%, which is compatible with a c-axis tilt of about 6 degrees.     

Eigenstates of polarization of elliptical single-mode fibers

The degree of polarization of radiation in an elliptical polarization-maintaining fiber and the polarization states of eigenpolarization modes of such fibers have been experimentally investigated in a wide spectral range. It has been shown that the elliptical fibers are uniform, homogeneously twisted fibers with elliptically polarized eigenpolarization modes. The ellipticity of the eigenpolarization mode is independent of fiber length and increases with wavelength, while the azimuth of the eigenpolarization mode is spectrally independent     

Transient thermal performance of line traps

This paper develops a transient thermal model for line traps. The model was incorporated into a computer program that numerically integrates the governing nonlinear differential equation in time to predict critical temperatures and component short and long term ratings for a wide range of operating conditions. The model accounts for many factors including: variable air properties, variable material properties, environmental conditions, and a wide variety of component geometries and orientations. To verify the temperatures predicted by the thermal model, The Georgia Power Research Center carried out an extensive series of indoor laboratory tests to experimentally measure temperatures of energized line traps under transient loading conditions. Model predictions were within 8°C for 75 percent of the data. This paper presents the development of the governing equations and describes in detail the calculation of the convective and radiative components of heat transfer. Comparisons of the model predictions for two different line trap designs in different orientations to experimental data are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and flexibility of the thermal model