Effects of different food commodities on larval development and α-amylase activity of Plodia interpunctella (Hübner) (Lepidoptera: Pyralidae)

The present work was undertaken to study the influence of four commodities (wheat flour, dates, sorghum and barley) on Plodia interpunctella post-embryonic development. Larval weight, larval mortality, pupation and adult emergence were recorded. The study also aimed to find out the effect of these commodities on protein and glycogen production as well as on α-amylase activity. Results indicated that the weight of fourth instar larvae placed on dates increased gradually. Percentage mortality was low. Pupation and adult emergence were delayed. In contrast, the weight of larvae placed on wheat flour, sorghum or barley remained low. Pupation and adult emergence occurred sooner than among those placed on dates and the percentage mortality was highest for larvae placed on barley. Results also showed that protein content and α-amylase activity were lower for larvae placed on dates than for those placed on other commodities. The biochemical composition of different commodities showed that dates are a rich source of glucose, while their protein and starch contents were very low as compared to the other commodities. In contrast, wheat flour, sorghum and barley contained large amounts of starch and protein and low amounts of glucose. Thus, the reduction in α-amylase activity was probably due to the high levels of glucose in dates.     

Nonlinear measures of mode-machine participation [transmissionsystem stability]

This work investigates the significance of higher-order terms on the modal behavior of a large, stressed power system's transient response. Second-order analysis indicates that many more frequencies of oscillation may have significant influence on the power system response. These additional frequencies result from second-order interactions of the linear modes and cannot be studied using linear analysis. A methodology based on the normal-form method is developed and utilized to describe the stressed, nonlinear system response. This methodology is used to extend linear concepts, such as eigenvectors and mode-state participation, to include second-order modal affects on power system performance. Data from the 50-generator IEEE test system is used in this investigation     

BOOKS RECEIVED

As a result of modifications of BET model assumptions a new equation for sorption/desorption isotherms containing three constants was obtained. The proposed equation was verified successfully by means of measurements of sorption and desorption isotherms of water vapour for 29 substances and low-temperature adsorption of argon on 10 materials. Our own equation fits better, sometimes even much better, to the experimental points than the relations proposed by Harkins and Jura. Kühn, Halsey, Henderson, and Brunauer. Emmett and Teller (n = ∞).     

Effect of Cu interlayer on opto-electrical parameters of ZnO thin films

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - In this paper, we focused our attention on the tailoring of structure and optical analysis as a function of Cu interlayer between the ZnO...     

Effect of polyaniline concentration on the photoconversion efficiency of nano-TiO<Subscript>2</Subscript> based dye sensitized solar cells

Extensive research have been made in improving the dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC) performance by designing, tailoring and enhancing the photoconversion properties of the matrix. The approaches used are material synthesis, dye permutation combinations, use of natural extracts or using several sensitizers. The polymers are also being explored in this regards in their pristine or composite forms. Therefore, in this study an attempt is made to synthesize a mesoporous polyaniline–titanium dioxide (PANI–TiO₂) nanocomposites with one pot synthesis approach at different concentrations of PANI (0.3–0.7 ml). Titanium isopropoxide was used as precursor for TiO₂ with aniline and the material was synthesized at ice bath temperature. Morphological observations showed that the composite is a mesoporous material with tubular structure where TiO₂ particles are seen entrapped in the polymer matrix and found that intercalation can be tailored with PANI concentration. Structural, functional and optical characterization indicate anatase phase of TiO₂, with several functional bands that can help in dye interaction and broad absorption bands within visible region. The photocurrent-voltage response was measured with simulated light and source-meter. It is interesting to note that increasing PANI concentration enhances the mesoporous structure and hence increases the dye loading capacity and photoconductivity of the material. The efficiency increased by about 22 % with addition of 0.5 ml of PANI from 0.3 ml. The proposed study has indicated that such material have the potential to be used for DSSC fabrication with which the device performance can further be increased to a better levels.     

The transient energy function method

The status of the transient energy function (TEF) method of direct analysis of transient stability of power systems is reviewed. The mathematical model is presented; an elementary theoretical basis of the method is introduced; the procedure for using the method in assessing power system transient stability is outlined; and the present condition of the technique and the available computer program is given. The outstanding issues, current development work and new applications are then summarized.     

An iterative method for modeling of antennas

An iterative process based on the wave concept is presented. This technique enables the rigorous treatment of radiating structures modeled by the finite element method (FEM) while preserving its computational efficiency. The coupling of the FEM model with the open region modeled by the integral equation technique is solved iteratively. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 11: 194–201, 2001.     

Kernel-based sparse representation for gesture recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel sparse representation based framework for classifying complicated human gestures captured as multi-variate time series (MTS). The novel feature extraction strategy, CovSVDK, can overcome the problem of inconsistent lengths among MTS data and is robust to the large variability within human gestures. Compared with PCA and LDA, the CovSVDK features are more effective in preserving discriminative information and are more efficient to compute over large-scale MTS datasets. In addition, we propose a new approach to kernelize sparse representation. Through kernelization, realized dictionary atoms are more separable for sparse coding algorithms and nonlinear relationships among data are conveniently transformed into linear relationships in the kernel space, which leads to more effective classification. Finally, the superiority of the proposed framework is demonstrated through extensive experiments.