Synchronised interrelationship between lipid/protein oxidation analysis and sensory attributes in refrigerated minced beef meat formulated with Punica granatum peel extract

Microbiological, chemical and sensory effects of pomegranate peel ethanol extract (EE) at 0.1, 0.5 and 1% (w w⁻¹) on refrigerated minced beef meat were undertaken. Chemical analyses revealed that the treated meat underwent significant decrease (P < 0.05) of primary and secondary lipid oxidation. By the end of storage, EE at 1% reduced the MetMb, carbonyl group accumulation and the disappearance of sulphydryl proteins by 56.68, 65.71 and 59.69% respectively, compared with control samples. EE at 1% showed also the highest scores for colour, appearance, odour and overall acceptability (OA) attributes using a 9-point hedonic scale. Chemometric approaches showed that lipid/protein oxidation analysis, sensory attributes and storage time allowed the samples discrimination. Oxidative stability parameters were equally used to predict OA by linear regression analysis. The reported data provide an approach to strengthen the interpretation of sensory quality and how they are affected by chemical changes in newly formulated meat products.     

Extending Gardiner’s code for Hieroglyphic recognition and English mapping

Multimedia Tools and Applications - “Knowledge is power”… Writing is the main way to preserve the humanity knowledge across the ages. Therefore, an automatic and accurate mapping...     

Optimal business process deployment cost in cloud resources

Cloud computing is the fastest emerging technology that proposes several resources under various pricing strategies that are specified based on temporal constraints. The main aim of cloud computing is to enhance the performance level and minimize operating costs. Thus, organizations looking towards optimizing their spending on IT infrastructure find such pricing strategies very attractive, especially, to deploy their business process models. However, discovering the optimal deployment cost of a business process in cloud resources proposed under various pricing strategies becomes a highly challenging problem. So, the objective of the present paper is to present an approach that assists business process designers in finding an optimal assignment or scheduling based on the variety of pricing strategies. We use linear programming models with an objective function under a set of constraints. Besides, we propose an extension of the famous cloud simulator provided in the market, CloudSim, to simulate the cloud resources consumed to deploy a business process model. The experimental results show the feasibility, effectiveness, and performance of our approach.

     

Determinants of e-consumer productivity in product retrieval on a commercial website: An experimental approach

This article investigates what determines e-consumer productivity, in the specific case of product retrieval, on a commercial website. With a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design on 292 participants, an online experiment reveals that productivity in product retrieval (measured in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and time) relates to website design (e.g., abstraction level of labels, animation), user characteristics (e.g., Internet experience, product category familiarity, cognitive absorption), and situational characteristics (e.g., task nature). The results also confirm interactive effects among the type of strategy used, the nature of the task, and the website design. These findings have notable implications for both research and practice.     

Effect of transmission error on the dynamic behaviour of gearbox housing

The dynamic response of gearbox remains a paramount concern because of noise generation. This work is concerned with numerical simulation of the overall dynamic behaviour of a parallel helical gear transmission. A dynamic sub-structuring method using different types of substructure (carrying and slave) is made to determine the natural frequencies and the corresponding mode shapes. The structure to be investigated is subdivided into components or sub-structures, which are then analyzed independently for natural frequencies and mode shapes. A numerical model taking into account the elastic coupling between the various components of a gearbox was developed. It allows studying and analyzing the dynamic behaviour of elastic housing in the presence of gear process. The static transmission error is introduced as a vibratory excitation source and it is represented by time-varying mesh stiffness. The discretization of the housing deformation energy and the kinetic energy expressions using plate finite elements leads to constructions of the stiffness and the mass matrixes. In dynamic analyses, time-discretization based on the Newmark method is used. The different equations governing movement of gearbox are established in a truncated modal base deduced from the average characteristics of the structure. A gearbox example is presented, and analyzed. A presentation and discussion of the numerical results was emphasized. The numerical results allow us to conclude on the dominant phenomena of the overall dynamic behaviour of the gear transmission.     

Microstructure characterization and tensile properties of direct squeeze cast and gravity die cast 2017A wrought Al alloy

Squeeze casting is a pressurized solidification process wherein finished components can be produced in a single process from molten metal to solid utilizing re-useable die tools. This one activates different physical processes which have metallurgical repercussions on the cast material structure. Desirable features of both casting and forging are combined in this hybrid method. 2017A aluminium alloy, conventionally used for wrought products, has been successfully cast using direct squeeze casting. Squeeze casting with an applied pressure removes the defects observed in gravity die cast samples. Tensile properties and microstructures are investigated. The results show that the finer microstructure was achieved through the squeeze casting. Furthermore, higher pressures improved the fracture properties and decreased the percentage of porosity of the cast alloy. The ultimate tensile strength, the yield strength and the elongation of the squeezed cast samples improved when the squeeze pressure increased.     

Searching for knee regions of the Pareto front using mobile reference points

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been recognized to be well suited to approximate the Pareto front of Multi-objective Optimization Problems (MOPs). In reality, the Decision Maker (DM) is not interested in discovering the whole Pareto front rather than finding only the portion(s) of the front that matches at most his/her preferences. Recently, several studies have addressed the decision-making task to assist the DM in choosing the final alternative. Knee regions are potential parts of the Pareto front presenting the maximal trade-offs between objectives. Solutions residing in knee regions are characterized by the fact that a small improvement in either objective will cause a large deterioration in at least another one which makes moving in either direction not attractive. Thus, in the absence of explicit DM’s preferences, we suppose that knee regions represent the DM’s preferences themselves. Recently, few works were proposed to find knee regions. This paper represents a further study in this direction. Hence, we propose a new evolutionary method, denoted TKR-NSGA-II, to discover knee regions of the Pareto front. In this method, the population is guided gradually by means of a set of mobile reference points. Since the reference points are updated based on trade-off information, the population converges towards knee region centers which allows the construction of a neighborhood of solutions in each knee. The performance assessment of the proposed algorithm is done on two- and three-objective knee-based test problems. The obtained results show the ability of the algorithm to: (1) find the Pareto optimal knee regions, (2) control the extent (We mean by extent the breadth/spread of the obtained knee region.) of the obtained regions independently of the geometry of the front and (3) provide competitive and better results when compared to other recently proposed methods. Moreover, we propose an interactive version of TKR-NSGA-II which is useful when the DM has no a priori information about the number of existing knees in the Pareto optimal front.     

Diversity combining with up‐link power control

We introduce in this paper a new adaptive power‐controlled diversity combining scheme that reduces the average transmitted power of the mobile units (MUs) while meeting a certain minimum required quality of service. The key idea is (i) to collect and combine all the available diversity paths at the base station (BS) and then (ii) to request the MU to increase or decrease its transmitted power just to track the required target signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR). Four power control variants accounting for practical implementation constraints including discrete power levels and transmitter gain saturation are proposed and studied. Some selected numerical results show that the proposed scheme offers considerable savings in the transmitted power levels over a wide SNR range but amplifier saturation leads to a violation of the target BER requirement in the low average SNR range. Additional numerical examples show that the power control variants that take into account practical implementation constraints conserve the main features of the ideal continuous power algorithm. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance analysis of subcarrier intensity modulation using rectangular QAM over Malaga turbulence channels with integer and non‐integer β

In this paper, we derive the performances of optical wireless communication system utilizing adaptive subcarrier intensity modulation over the Malaga turbulent channel. More specifically, analytical closed‐form solutions and asymptotic results are derived for average bit error rate, achievable spectral efficiency, outage probability, and ergodic capacity by utilizing series expansion identity of modified Bessel function. Our asymptotic and analytical results based on series solutions with finite numbers highly matched to the numerical results. By exploiting the inherent nature of fading channel, the proposed adaptive scheme enhances the spectral efficiency without additional transmit power while satisfying the required bit error rate criterion. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.