Teff (Eragrostis tef) processing,utilization and future opportunities: a review

The demand for food production has been constantly increasing due to rising population. In developed countries, for example, the emergence of regional production of old grains that are rarely utilized, along with the production of commonly consumed grains, has gained importance in recent years. These grains, known collectively as ancient or heirloom grains, have offered both farmers and consumers novel ways of cultivation and products with interesting taste, characteristics and nutritional value. Among the 30 000 plant species known, only five cereals currently provide more than 50% of the world's energy intake – bread wheat (Triticum aestivum), rice (Oryza sativa), sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), millets (Panicum sp.) and maize (Zea mays). The excessive utilization of these selected species has a great potential to cause genetic losses and difficulty in bridging future agricultural demands. Teff (Eragrostis tef), an ancient grain extensively cultivated in countries like Eritrea and Ethiopia, provides promising alternatives for new food uses since its nutritional value is significantly higher than most others cereal grains. The absence of gluten allows flexibility in food utilization since it can be directly substituted to gluten-containing products. The grain also offers an excellent balance of essential amino acids and minerals, which can fulfil the recommended daily intake and eliminates the need for fortification and enrichment. This review provides a general overview of the physical properties and nutritional composition of teff grains related to processing and applications in the food and feed industries. The current status of teff utilization, as well as the challenges in production and commercialization, and future opportunities is presented and discussed.     

Composing RESTful Services and Collaborative Workflows: A Lightweight Approach

The use of RESTful Web services has gained momentum in the development of distributed applications based on traditional Web standards such as HTTP. In particular, these services can integrate easily into various applications, such as mashups. Composing RESTful services into Web-scale workflows requires a lightweight composition language that's capable of describing both the control and data flow that constitute a workflow. The authors address these issues with Bite, a lightweight and extensible composition language that enables the creation of Web-scale workflows and uses RESTful services as its main composable entities.     

Cellular manufacturing system design considering machines reliability and parts alternative process routings

Cell formation is an important problem in the design of cellular manufacturing systems (CMS). Most cell formation methods appeared in the literature assume that each part has one process plan, and all machines are 100% reliable with unlimited capacity. However, this is not realistic in manufacturing systems. Considering machines reliability in addition to machines capacity and machine duplicates during the part route selection process help to obtain better machine grouping and minimum total cost for CMS. Considering these factors in addition to operations sequence and production volumes makes the problem more complex but more realistic. Most of the methods appeared in the literature to solve such problems use mathematical programming procedures that take large amount of computational efforts. Procedures using similarity coefficient method are more flexible in incorporating various important production data and lend easily to computer applications. A new similarity coefficient equation that incorporates all these production factors is developed. Also, a procedure that captures the similarity between machine groups and minimises the total CMS cost is developed. The procedure utilises functional cells to eliminate intercellular moves and achieve ‘one-piece flow’ practise. The methodology is compared with other methods in the literature and found to be more effective.     

Fusion of thermal infrared and visible spectra for robust moving object detection

The detection of moving objects is a crucial step for many video surveillance applications whether using a visible camera (VIS) or an infrared (IR) one. In order to profit from both types, several fusion methods were proposed in the literature: low-level fusion, medium-level fusion and high-level fusion. The first one is the most used for moving objects’ detection in IR and VIS spectra. In this paper, we present an overview of the different moving object detection methods in IR and VIS spectra and a state of the art of the low-level fusion techniques. Moreover, we propose a new method for moving object detection using low-level fusion of IR and VIS spectra. In order to evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively our proposed method, three series of experiments were carried out using two well-known datasets namely “OSU Color-Thermal Database” and “INO-Database”; the results of these evaluations show promising results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Molar volume of eutectic solvents as a function of molar composition and temperature☆

The conventional Rackett model for predicting liquid molar volume has been modified to cater for the effect of molar composition of the Deep Eutectic Solvents (DES). The experimental molar volume data for a group of commonly used DES has been used for optimizing the improved model. The data involved different molar compositions of each DES. The validation of the new model was performed on another set of DESs. The average relative deviation of the model on the training and validation datasets was approximately 0.1%while the Rackett model gave a relative deviation of more than 1.6%. The modified model deals with variations in DES molar com-position and temperature in a more consistent way than the original Rackett model which exhibits monotonic performance degradation as temperature moves away from reference conditions. Having the composition of the DES as a model variable enhances the practical utilization of the predicting model in diverse design and process simulation applications.     

TMT-HCC: A tool for text mining the biomedical literature for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) biomarkers identification

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. New insights into the pathogenesis of this lethal disease are urgently needed. Chromosomal copy number alterations (CNAs) can lead to activation of oncogenes and inactivation of tumor suppressors in human cancers. Thus, identification of cancer-specific CNAs will not only provide new insight into understanding the molecular basis of tumor genesis but also facilitate the identification of HCC biomarkers using CNA.     

Multi-breath dry powder inhaler for delivery of cohesive powders in the treatment of bronchiectasis

A series of co-engineered macrolide–mannitol particles were successfully prepared using azithromycin (AZ) as a model drug. The formulation was designed to target local inflammation and bacterial colonization, via the macrolide component, while the mannitol acted as mucolytic and taste-masking agent. The engineered particles were evaluated in terms of their physico-chemical properties and aerosol performance when delivered via a novel high-payload dry powder Orbital^? inhaler device that operates via multiple inhalation manoeuvres. All formulations prepared were of suitable size for inhalation drug delivery and contained a mixture of amorphous AZ with crystalline mannitol. A co-spray dried formulation containing 200?mg of 50:50?w/w AZ: mannitol had 57.6%?±?7.6% delivery efficiency with a fine particle fraction (≤6.8?µm) of the emitted aerosol cloud being 80.4%?±?1.1%, with minimal throat deposition (5.3?±?0.9%). Subsequently, it can be concluded that the use of this device in combination with the co-engineered macrolide–mannitol therapy may provide a means of treating bronchiectasis.     

Tunning the Physical Properties of PVDF/PVC/Zinc Ferrite Nanocomposites Films for More Efficient Adsorption of Cd (II)

This work deals with the synthesis of ZnFe₂O₄ NPs and studies the effect of addition on the physical properties PVDF/PVC blend. XRD affirmed the formation of ZnFe₂O₄ NPs and HRTEM shows that the size of the prepared ZnFe₂O₄ NPs ranged from 20 to 55 nm. The effect of ZnFe₂O₄ on the behavior of PVDF/PVC was studied through XRD, ATR-FTIR, FESEM and UV–Visible spectroscopy. XRD revealed that the addition of ZnFe₂O₄ NPs enhanced the crystallinity of PVDF/PVC blend system and also confirmed the incorporation of ZnFe₂O₄ NPs by appearing a diffraction peak at 2θ equals 35°. ATR-FTIR affirmed the interaction between blend sample and ZnFe₂O₄ NPs by appearing new bands 554 cm^?1 and 421 cm^?1 which are corresponded to ZnFe₂O₄ NPs functional group with appearing a new band at 603 cm^?1. FESEM showed that the addition of ZnFe₂O₄ to PVDF/PVC blend improved surface properties, for example, roughness average has been increased from 319 to 414 nm while maximum height increased from 260 to 473 nm for PVDF/PVC and PVDF/PVC/10% ZnFe₂O₄, respectively. Optical properties and band gap calculations revealed that addition of ZnFe₂O₄ NPs changes the structure of polyblend samples which results due to the formation of localized states. The removal efficiency of Cd (II) by using PVDF/PVC/10% ZnFe₂O₄ reached about 50% at pH 6 after 60 min. the absorption mechanism as well as kinetics isotherm have been studied. It is found that adsorption of Cd (II) occurred through the Langmuir mechanism and fellow pseudo-second order isotherm.

     

Performance analysis of three advanced controllers for polymerization batch reactor: An experimental investigation

The performances of three advanced non-linear controllers are analyzed for the optimal set point tracking of styrene free radical polymerization (FRP) in batch reactors. The three controllers are the artificial neural network-based MPC (NN-MPC), the artificial fuzzy logic controller (FLC) as well as the generic model controller (GMC). A recently developed hybrid model (Hosen et al., 2011a. Asia-Pac. J. Chem. Eng. 6(2), 274) is utilized in the control study to design and tune the proposed controllers. The optimal minimum temperature profiles are determined using the Hamiltonian maximum principle. Different types of disturbances are introduced and applied to examine the stability of controller performance. The experimental studies revealed that the performance of the NN-MPC is superior to that of FLC and GMC.