Unsaponified and unsaponifiable determinations as applied to incompletely saponified soaps

Unsaponified and unsaponifiable determinations were made on toilet bar soap, potash vegetable oil paste soap, yellow laundry soap and hardwater cocoa bar soap according to the method of (1) the American Oil Chemists’ Society, and (2) the Society of Public Analysts (British). The results obtained by the two methods were comparable for toilet bar soap, potash vegetable oil paste soap and yellow laundry soap. The unsaponifiable matter in hardwater cocoa bar soap, however, appeared considerably lower when determined by the A. O. C. S. method than when determined by the S. P. A. method. Extraction of unsaponified matter in the former method is by petroleum ether; in the latter method by ethyl ether. In order to determine whether the difference in results could be traced to the difference in solvents, extraction with petroleum ether in the A. O. C. S. method was followed by extraction with ethyl ether. The weight of unsaponified matter (50 gram sample) was increased thereby from 0.791 g. to 1.423 g. The saponification value of the ethyl ether extract under the A. O. C. S. method tended to show that practically all of the additional material extracted with ethyl ether was made up of mono and diglycerides with the mono predominating.     

A probabilistic indirect adaptive control for systems with input‐dependent noise

A probabilistic indirect adaptive controller is proposed for the general nonlinear multivariate class of discrete time system. The proposed probabilistic framework incorporates input–dependent noise prediction parameters in the derivation of the optimal control law. Moreover, because noise can be nonstationary in practice, the proposed adaptive control algorithm provides an elegant method for estimating and tracking the noise. For illustration purposes, the developed method is applied to the affine class of nonlinear multivariate discrete time systems and the desired result is obtained: the optimal control law is determined by solving a cubic equation and the distribution of the tracking error is shown to be Gaussian with zero mean. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is demonstrated numerically through the simulation of an affine nonlinear system. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Principles for microwave moisture and density measurement in grain and seed.

The importance of cereal grain moisture content in determining time of harvest and in preserving grain quality is described. Techniques for moisture measurement, including electronic moisture meters, are also discussed briefly, and the need for better moisture sensing techniques for modern agricultural on-line moisture monitoring is described. Principles of microwave free-space measurements involving attenuation and phase-shift determination are explained, and density-independent functions of the grain permittivity are presented that permit reliable moisture sensing applicable to moving grain in which bulk density variation occurs. Three different approaches are discussed for determining moisture content and bulk density of grain from microwave measurement of the dielectric properties. A new moisture calibration function, based on complex-plane plots of dielectric constant and loss factor, each divided by bulk density, is described, which promises a universal calibration for different types of grain and seed. This important advantage should encourage commercial development for practical use.     

Effect of bit-to-bit dependence on packet error rate using asynchronous DS-CDMA for mobile packet radio networks

The probability of packet success for asynchronous direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) over the multipath fading channel is investigated under different fading conditions and for different cases. We studied the bit-to-bit dependence caused by the multipath fading and by the multiple access interference (MAI) originating from the chip and phase offsets between the desired and interfering signals. We investigated the effect of using the Gaussian versus the improved Gaussian process on the computation of probability of packet success as well as the effect of the bit-to-bit dependence within a packet. The improved Gaussian approximation provides more accurate values for the probability of bit error for any number of simultaneous users, while it also allows us to incorporate the effects of bit-to-bit dependence into the calculations of the probability of packet success.This paper was presented in part at the 17th Biennial Symposium on Communiations, Kingston, June 1994. This work was supported by a strategic grant (STR-0100720) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada.     

Numerical modeling of a human stented trachea under different stent designs

Endotracheal stenting is a common treatment for tracheal disorders as stenosis, cronic cough or dispnoea episodes. However, medical treatment and surgery are still challenging due to the difficulties in overcoming potential prosthesis complications. In this work we analyze the response of the tracheal wall during breathing and coughing conditions under different stent implantations. A finite element model of a human trachea was developed and used to analyze tracheal deformability after prosthesis implantation under normal breathing and coughing using a fluid-structure interaction approach (FSI). The geometry of the trachea is obtained from computed tomography (CT) images of a healthy patient. A structured hexahedral-based grid for the tracheal wall and an unstructured tetrahedral-based mesh with coincident nodes for the fluid were used to perform the simulations with a finite element-based commercial software code. Tracheal wall is modeled as a fiber reinforced hyperelastic solid material in which the anisotropy due to the orientation of the fibers is taken into account. Deformations of the tracheal cartilage rings and of the muscle membrane, as well as the maximum principal stresses in the wall, are analyzed and compared with those of the healthy trachea in absence of prosthesis. The results showed that, the presence of the stent prevents tracheal muscle deflections especially during coughing. In addition, we proposed a methodology to evaluate, through numerical simulations, the predisposition of the stent to migrate.     

New density-independent calibration function for microwave sensingof moisture content in particulate materials

Microwave techniques have been considered for a long time for moisture sensing in many food processing and agriculture-related industries. They are suitable for on-line real-time monitoring and control. However, with particulate materials, bulk density fluctuations cause significant errors in moisture content determination. To overcome this shortcoming, density-independent calibration functions are needed. In this paper, a new approach is presented in which both bulk density and moisture content are determined directly from measured microwave dielectric properties. A simple relationship between bulk density and the dielectric properties is identified, and a new density-independent function for moisture content prediction, exclusively dependent on the dielectric properties of the material under test (ϵ', ϵ"), is proposed. The validity and applicability of this function are demonstrated with an extensive data set obtained from measurements on a granular material (wheat), over wide ranges of frequency (11-18 GHz), temperature (-1°C-42°C), moisture content (10.6%-19.2%, wet basis), and bulk density (0.72-0.88 g/cm³). Explicit calibration equations for moisture prediction at different frequencies and temperatures are provided. Although data obtained by a transmission microwave measurement technique were used, this new approach remains valid in general for other techniques, provided that ϵ' and ϵ" are determined accurately