Enzymatic modification of canola/palm oil mixtures: Effects on the fluidity of the mixture

The bioreactor system to interesterify edible oils and fats at an ultra-micro aqueous phase of 100 ppm and less was investigated. The adsorption of lecithin, together with lipase onto a carrier, was effective for conducting the interesterifying reaction efficiently for oils and fats in micro aqueous phase. To improve the handling properties of palm oil at rather low temperature, palm oil was blended with canola or soybean oil, and then these blended oils were modified by enzymatic selective interesterification in a solvent-free, ultra-micro aqueous bioreactor system with an immobilized lipase that had 1,3-positional specificity. The effects of enzymatic interesterification were confirmed by triglyceride determination, by solid fat content profiles and by cloud point profiles, which were also compared to products of chemical interesterification. The improvement in the fluidity of blended oils with canola oil by the enzymatic reaction was bigger than with soybean oil, and chemical interesterification had no effects on the fluidity of blended oils.     

Novel CO2 Absorbents Using Lithium-Containing Oxide

We have discovered a series of lithium-containing oxides that immediately react with ambient carbon dioxide (CO₂) up to 700°C. The products react and return reversibly to the oxides at a temperatures higher than about 700°C. The absorption capacity surpasses that of other CO₂ absorbents by a factor of 10. Utilizing these absorbents, the possibility of a CO₂ separation system that operates at around 500°C is proposed. It is generally believed that a CO₂ separation process operable at temperatures higher than 500°C has the special benefit of a small energy penalty. Moreover, the absorption also proceeds at ambient temperature in the atmospheric environment. This property offers the possibility of many other applications, such as air cleaners or cartridges. Therefore, we think these materials have the potential to make a valuable contribution to the realization of CO₂ emission control.     

Thermal Response and Oxidation of Tyranno™-Fiber-Reinforced Si-Ti-C-O Matrix Composites for a Thermal Protection System in High-Enthalpy Dissociated Air

The thermal response and oxidation of Tyranno™ Lox-M fiber-reinforced Si-Ti-C-O matrix composites in high-enthalpy dissociated air was investigated in an arc jet facility (an arc wind tunnel). The maximum surface temperature reached 1310–1670°C. Catalytic recombination of oxygen and nitrogen on the composite surface under dissociated air was not significant. Surface recession was insignificant below 1600°C surface temperatures and above 5 kPa of oxygen partial pressure at the stagnation point. Passive-to-active oxidation transition of the composite agreed with Balat's theory for monolithic silicon carbide. A glass sealant prevented active oxidation of the composite for short-time exposures.     

Finding division points for a time series corpus based on structural change point detection

This paper describes a method of finding the proper points for dividing a corpus with time series information to extract local and frequent keywords. Previous works have proposed the corpus separating method for extracting keywords from a corpus. However, this method divides a corpus at equal intervals so that it cannot consider the topic changes. The present paper utilizes the idea of the topic model and the topic extracted through latent Dirichlet allocation to consider the topic change. This paper identifies the points at which large topic changes occur to divide the corpus using structural change detection method. An experiment involving newspaper articles with 5-year topics confirm that the points at which the topics of each document change are detected to find the division points based on the idea of structural change point detection and our method is better than previous methods based on recall measure.     

Swarm robotic network using Lévy flight in target detection problem

One approach in swarm robotics is homogeneous system which is embedded with sensing, computing, mobile and communication components. In this study, a target detection problem, which is one of navigation problems, was employed. Once a robot detects a target, robots immediately communicate with a base station via intermediate relay robots due to the multi-hop transmission of wireless communication. Therefore, this control task is completed with connectivity of the network. In a target detection problem, we must improve the performance of exploration as well as connectivity of the network. This study investigates the performances of the two types of random walk algorithm in navigation while loosely ensuring connectivity of the robotic network based on our previous study.     

Proposal of variable sequential sampling plan having desired operating characteristics indexed by quality loss

The proportion of non-conforming items has been traditionally utilised as an evaluation criterion for quality of items. However, the proportion of non-conforming items is not necessarily useful as a proper evaluation criterion for controlling high-quality manufacturing in recent years. Accordingly, in order to achieve further quality improvement and innovation, more careful quality evaluation has been required newly. Then, a concept of quality loss in the Taguchi methods has been devised as a severe criterion of quality evaluation. Hereby, a variable single sampling plan having desired operating characteristics (OCs) indexed by quality loss has been proposed in the area of statistical quality control. By the way, the most economical sampling inspection in the average sample number (ASN) is the sequential sampling plan based on the Wald’s sequential probability ratio test. Then, from the viewpoint of cost reduction, we discuss a variable sequential sampling plan having desired OC indexed by quality loss with the aim of expansion of the utility of variable sampling plan for quality loss. As the result, the design procedure of the sequential sampling plan for satisfying some required design conditions indexed by quality loss is provided. In addition, the effectiveness of the proposed sequential sampling plan is verified through some numerical examples.     

Development of ‘UR-System 2’: a training system for recovery of motor function of plegic upper limb after stroke

We developed a new training system, called ‘UR-System 2’, for the recovery of motor function of a plegic upper limb after stroke. UR-System 2, which was redesigned based on knowledge gained from clinical tests using UR-System 1, was newly equipped with a function for testing the motor function of patients, such as isolated movement. In order to verify the effectiveness of UR-System 2, we conducted the following procedures: we verified the safety of training in healthy persons; we gathered standard data on pronation and supination of healthy forearms during tests; and, we verified that the test function was effective in evaluating the recovery effect of isolated movement in two hemiplegic patients.     

Minimizing False Positives of a Decision Tree Classifier for Intrusion Detection on the Internet

Machine learning or data mining technologies are often used in network intrusion detection systems. An intrusion detection system based on machine learning utilizes a classifier to infer the current state from the observed traffic attributes. The problem with learning-based intrusion detection is that it leads to false positives and so incurs unnecessary additional operation costs. This paper investigates a method to decrease the false positives generated by an intrusion detection system that employs a decision tree as its classifier. The paper first points out that the information-gain criterion used in previous studies to select the attributes in the tree-constructing algorithm is not effective in achieving low false positive rates. Instead of the information-gain criterion, this paper proposes a new function that evaluates the goodness of an attribute by considering the significance of error types. The proposed function can successfully choose an attribute that suppresses false positives from the given attribute set and the effectiveness of using it is confirmed experimentally. This paper also examines the more trivial leaf rewriting approach to benchmark the proposed method. The comparison shows that the proposed attribute evaluation function yields better solutions than the leaf rewriting approach.

Socializing artifacts as a half mirror of the mind

In the near future, our life will normally be surrounded with fairly complicated artifacts, enabled by the autonomous robot and brain–machine interface technologies. In this paper, we argue that what we call the responsibility flaw problem and the inappropriate use problem need to be overcome in order for us to benefit from complicated artifacts. In order to solve these problems, we propose an approach to endowing artifacts with an ability of socially communicating with other agents based on the artifact-as-a-half-mirror metaphor. The idea is to have future artifacts behave according to the hybrid intention composed of the owner’s intention and the social rules. We outline the approach and discuss its feasibility together with preliminary work.

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Microgravity performance of micro pulsating heat pipes

A micro pulsating heat pipe made of a thin clear Teflon tube of 1.6 mm ID was used to observe the pulsating flow inside a heat pipe under different gravity levels using parabolic flights. More vigorous pulsating flow was observed under microgravity, compared to the depressed movements under hypergravity. Two metallic micro pulsating heat pipes made of an aluminum plate with small internal channels were also tested to investigate the effect of gravity on their heat transfer characteristics. Reduced gravity experiments were performed aboard Falcon 20 aircraft flying parabolic trajectories. Under normal and hypergravity conditions, both the orientation of the pulsating heat pipe and locations of the heated and cooled sections affected the heat transfer performance. Under reduced gravity, however, the heat pipes showed better operating and heat transfer performance than that under normal and hypergravity. These experiments have for the first time confirmed that pulsating heat pipes are capable of operating under reduced gravity and thus are suitable for deployment in space applications such as satellites.