Active chitosan–chestnut extract films used for packaging and storage of fresh pasta

A tannins-rich chestnut extract was used to enhance the antioxidant and antibacterial properties of chitosan-based film materials. The favourable mechanical properties of the novel material enabled its application in the preparation of the sachets that were used for packing and storage of filled fresh pasta. The fresh pasta ageing progressed in conventional refrigerated storage conditions of 8 °C with 60 ± 2% relative humidity in the absence of light for 60 days. The rapid moisture mobility between a starchy food and sachets during the first 9 days of storage induced retrogradation of the fresh pasta, whereby total phenolic content show dependency on moisture throughout the shelf life. Active components within the sachet prevented microbial growth on the food surface during the entire 60 days.     

Traglastberechnung von Nagelverbindungen

To determine characteristic values of the strength of nonpredrilled nailed connections, ultimate loads were calculated for Monte-Carlo simulated joints with differing numbers of nail rows and nails row. Simulation of the load-slip curves of single nails within a joint was based on the correlation structure of the parameters of the lead-slip behaviour, determined in previous studies. When rows are arranged parallel to load, the characteristic ultimate load per nail is independent of the number of nails per row and increases slightly with the number of rows.     

autoBOT: evolving neuro-symbolic representations for explainable low resource text classification

Machine Learning - Learning from texts has been widely adopted throughout industry and science. While state-of-the-art neural language models have shown very promising results for text...     

Scale influence on the hydrodynamics of an internal loop airlift reactor

The overall circulation velocity, the overall riser and downcomer gas hold-ups and the effect of reactor scale on a two-phase circulation regimes were studied in this work in three airlift reactors of different scale. The measurements were carried out in airlift reactor with internal loops (IALRs) with a working volume of 10.5, 32 and 200 l at the range of temperatures 18–21 °C, under atmospheric pressure. Air and water were used as gas and liquid media. The three reactors were of similar geometry, the ratio between riser and downcomer cross-sectional areas, the aspect ratio of the column and the shape of the column bottom were taken as similarity criteria. In order to determine the linear circulation velocities, the magnetic tracer method was used. The riser and the downcomer were studied separately. Based on gas hold-up in both the riser and the downcomer, two regimes (homogeneous bubble (HMG) and heterogeneous churn-turbulent (HTG)) of the two-phase flow were observed. These were defined by Daniels [Chem. Eng. 70 (1995)] and described using the correlation proposed by Chisti [Airlift Bioreactors, Elsevier, London, 1989]. The average of the liquid circulation velocities increased with increasing reactor scale for the same superficial gas velocity. The overall circulation velocity was modelled on the basis of the momentum balance proposed in paper [Chem. Eng. Sci. 52 (1997) 25]. The parameters of both the correlation and the model tend to be constant for larger reactor scales. The value of the driving force (_R−_D) was found to be important only for lower values of gas flow rate, because at higher values, the circulation velocity seemed to be governed only by friction in the reactor vessel.     

Sleeping beauties in health informatics research

Scientometrics - Scientific publications are received by the research community in various ways. Some articles are quickly cited, while others are discovered only after a longer period of time. The...