Soluble dietary fibres from sugarcane bagasse

Soluble dietary fibres from sugarcane bagasse were extracted under alkaline conditions and characterised. Precipitated fibres were dialysed, and the fibre composition was evaluated before and after the dialysis step. Compositional analysis indicated that the fibres both before and after dialysis consisted of 39% w/w total sugars, 16% w/w protein, 10% w/w Klason lignin and 30% w/w ash. Xylose was the main neutral sugar followed by arabinose with glucose, galactose and uronic acids also present in all samples. The structural properties were also spectroscopically examined, which confirmed the presence of arabinoxylans. Macromolecular characterisation revealed that molecular weight is reduced after dialysis, indicating that a range of dietary fibres with different macromolecular characteristics may be obtained depending on the specific processing steps. The present work shows that soluble arabinoxylans may be obtained from sugarcane agricultural wastes that may be used as a source of novel dietary fibres.     

Dietary fibre from berry-processing waste and its impact on bread structure: a review

The structure and function of by-products of berry-processing industries are reviewed, with particular attention to dietary fibre (DF) and its effects in food products. The complex chemical composition and physicochemical characteristics of DF have been investigated and strategies for extraction of specific fractions that provide tailored technological and physiological functionality have been reviewed. The aim of this review is to describe in detail the structural composition and isolation methods of dietary fibre derived from berry by-products, and to explore their potential functionality in foods. The goal is to introduce DF from berry waste streams into the food chain, for which bread is a major vehicle. However, the appeal of bread lies in its aerated structure, for which DF is generally detrimental. The technological influence of DF on the formation and stabilization of the aerated structure of bread is therefore reviewed, in order to understand how to incorporate DF into bread while maintaining palatability. The aerated structure of bread is stabilized by two mechanisms: the gluten matrix and the liquid film surrounding bubbles. Incorporating DF successfully into bread requires understanding its interactions with both of these mechanisms. DF fractions from berries offer superior nutritional value compared to cereal fibre, potentially with less damage to bread structure, due to the higher proportion of soluble fibre. By-products from berry-processing industries could be used as a source of technologically and nutritionally distinctive DF to fabricate foods with enhanced nutritional value. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry     

Physicochemical properties of a dressing-type o/w emulsion as influenced by orange pulp fiber incorporation

A low-in-oil dressing-type o/w emulsion incorporating a rich-in-fiber orange pulp commercial product, either in crude form or following comminution, was prepared and the rheological properties and physicochemical stability of the emulsion were studied. Interactions between the adsorbed at the droplet surfaces yolk proteins and the pulp surface constituents, possibly electrostatic in nature, resulted in extensive droplet aggregation. This was reflected in the dramatic increase of emulsion rheological parameter values, derived by applying the power or the Casson equation to shear stress-rate of shear data. Pulp incorporation resulted in an improvement of emulsion stability against creaming while the stability against droplet coalescence was only marginally affected. In addition, the rheological parameter values of the fortified with pulp emulsion exhibited an appreciable increase with storage, especially in the case of emulsions incorporating the crude pulp. These findings are combined with oil droplet or pulp particle size and ζ-potential data to probe the emulsion structure and explain its behavior during aging.     

Robust stabilization of singular systems withH ∞-bounded uncertainty

In this paper the problem of robust stabilizing a linear, time-invariant singular system is studied. The characterization is given in terms ofH -bounded perturbations to the numerator and denominator factors of its normalized left coprime factorization. An optimal stability margin is provided in terms of the definition of the Hankel norm of a singular system. The Hankel norm is computed using two generalized Lyapunov equations.This research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract MDA-972-93-1-0032 and MDA-972-95-3-0016.     

Input Feature Extraction for Multilayered Perceptrons Using Supervised Principal Component Analysis

A method is proposed for constructing salient features from a set of features that are given as input to a feedforward neural network used for supervised learning. Combinations of the original features are formed that maximize the sensitivity of the network's outputs with respect to variations of its inputs. The method exhibits some similarity to Principal Component Analysis, but also takes into account supervised character of the learning task. It is applied to classification problems leading to improved generalization ability originating from the alleviation of the curse of dimensionality problem.     

OPC-SMS: a wireless gateway to OPC-based data sources

This paper describes OPC-SMS gateway, a platform that integrates IP networks with the Short Message Service (SMS), in order to deliver an integrated service for access to data sources conforming to Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control (OPC) standard specifications, through SMS-enabled mobile devices. The gateway supports pull and push services in order to support both request-based and alarm/scheduled-based notifications, respectively. The proposed architecture is based entirely on the ubiquitous HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Extensible Markup Language (XML) protocols, and the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) network and thus exploits the network infrastructure already in place. The capability of accessing different types of OPC data sources (real-time and historical) by any SMS-enabled device consists of a highly flexible service, supporting mobility and event-based notification. A pilot implementation of our approach has been tested in a large-scale installation for accessing OPC data sources of several automation subsystems in a hospital.