Genotypic variation of spring wheats for solvent retention capacities in relation to end-use quality

The solvent retention capacity (SRC) test is useful to measure flour components contributing to end-use functionality especially where the sample number is large and grain quantities are limited. The water, sodium carbonate, lactic acid, and sucrose SRC values ranged 78.0-98.0, 95.0-127.5, 101.5-139.0, and 125.0-163.0 g/100 g, respectively in 50 spring wheat varieties. Water SRC positively correlated with cookie spread ratio (r = 0.29) while Lactic acid SRC and Sucrose SRC positively correlated with cookie thickness (r = 0.31) and (r = 0.23). Negative correlation coefficients were observed in water SRC and cookie thickness (r = −0.27). Lactic acid SRC also negatively correlated with cookie spread ratio (r = −0.34). Sodium carbonate SRC was found to be negatively correlated with cookie diameter (r = −0.19) and cookie spread ratio (r = −0.16). The SRC test is a promising method for the evaluation of soft wheat varieties on the basis of their biochemical characteristics.     

Mechanisms of RF Current Collapse in AlGaN–GaN High Electron Mobility Transistors

The physical mechanisms underlying RF current- collapse effects in AlGaN-GaN high-electron-mobility transistors are investigated by means of measurements and numerical device simulations. This paper suggests the following conditions: 1) both surface and buffer traps can contribute to RF current collapse through a similar physical mechanism involving capture and emission of electrons tunneling from the gate; 2) surface passivation strongly mitigates RF current collapse by reducing the surface electric field and inhibiting electron injection into traps; 3) for surface-trap densities lower than 9 x 1012 cm^-2, surface-potential barriers in the 1-2-eV range can coexist with surface traps having much a shallower energy and, therefore, inducing RF current-collapse effects characterized by relatively short time constants.     

Group topic modeling for academic knowledge discovery

Conference mining and expert finding are useful academic knowledge discovery problems from an academic recommendation point of view. Group level (GL) topic modeling can provide us with richer text semantics and relationships, which results in denser topics. And denser topics are more useful for academic discovery issues in contrast to Element level (EL) or Document level (DL) topic modeling, which produces sparser topics. Previous methods performed academic knowledge discovery by using network connectivity (only links not text of documents), keywords-based matching (no semantics) or by using semantics-based intrinsic structure of the words presented between documents (semantics at DL), while ignoring semantics-based intrinsic structure of the words and relationships between conferences (semantics at GL). In this paper, we consider semantics-based intrinsic structure of words and relationships presented in conferences (richer text semantics and relationships) by modeling from GL. We propose group topic modeling methods based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Detailed empirical evaluation shows that our proposed GL methods significantly outperformed DL methods for conference mining and expert finding problems.     

Utilization of dairy byproduct proteins, surfactants, and enzymes in frozen dough

Use of natural additives is gaining popularity among the masses as they are becoming more conscious about their diet and health. Frozen dough products are one of the recent examples of value-added cereal products which face stability problems during extended storage periods of times. Dairy whey proteins, surfactants, and certain enzymes are considered important natural additives which could be used to control the water redistribution problem in the dough structure during the storage condition. They interact with the starch and gluten network in a dough system and thus behave as dough improvers and strengtheners. These natural additives not only help to bind extra moisture but also to improve texture and sensory attributes in frozen dough bakery products.     

Numerical solution of the spatially distributed population balance equation describing the hydrodynamics of interacting liquid-liquid dispersions

In liquid-liquid contacting equipment such as completely mixed and differential contactors, droplet population balance based modeling is now being used to describe the complex hydrodynamic behavior of the dispersed phase. For the hydrodynamics of these interacting dispersions this model accounts for droplet breakage, droplet coalescence, axial dispersion, exit and entry events. The resulting population balance equations are integro-partial differential equations (IPDE) that rarely have an analytical solution, especially when they show spatial dependency, and hence numerical solutions are sought in general. To do this, these IPDEs are projected onto a system of convective dominant partial differential equations by discretizing the droplet diameter (internal coordinate). This is accomplished by generalizing the fixed-pivot (GFP) technique of Kumar and Ramkrishna (Chem. Eng. Sci. 51 (1996a) 1311) handling any two integral properties of the population number density for continuous flow systems by treating the inlet feed distribution as a source term. Moreover, the GFD technique has the advantage of being free of repeated or double integral evaluation resulting from the weighted residual approaches such as the Galerkin's method. This allows the time-dependent breakage and coalescence functions to be easily handled without appreciable increase in the computational time. The resulting system of PDEs is spatially discretized in conservative form using a simplified first order upwind scheme as well as first- and second-order non-oscillatory central differencing schemes. This spatial discretization avoids the characteristic decomposition of the convective flux based on the approximate Riemann solvers and the operator splitting technique required by classical upwind schemes. The time variable is discretized using an implicit strongly stable approach that is formulated by careful lagging of the non-linear parts of the convective and source terms. The algorithm is tested against analytical solutions of the simplified population balance equation for a differential liquid-liquid extraction column through four case studies. In all these case studies the discrete models converge successfully to the available analytical solutions and to solutions on relatively fine grids when the analytical solution is not available. Realization of the algorithm is accomplished by comparing its predictions to experimental steady-state hydrodynamic data of a laboratory scale rotating disc contactor of diameter. Practically, the combined algorithm is found fast enough for the computation of the transient and steady-state hydrodynamic behavior of the continuously and spatially distributed interacting liquid-liquid dispersions.