Frozen food is exposed to inevitable temperature changes during its storage, transport, and at the point of sale, which implies a significant impact on its properties and quality. Thus, the study of the effect of the formation of crystals on both the surface of the meat and the container when it is kept frozen, involving the thermodynamic analysis and changes that occurred at the structural level, is necessary. In this research, pork meat from Longissimus thoracis muscle was used, which was cut into plates and packed with two types of food-grade films: (1) Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) and (2) low-density polyethylene (LDPE). Samples were frozen by indirect contact with nitrogen up to −40 ± 0.5 °C and subsequently stored at −20 ± 1 °C in a chamber from 0 to 15 days. The frost thickness was evaluated by the image superposition method. FTIR spectra were obtained by means of an Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) accessory, and thermal changes were determined by Modulated Differential Scanning... [more]

Three-dimensional printing is one of the most promising areas of additive manufacturing with a constantly growing range of applications. One of the current tasks is the development of new functional materials that would allow the manufacture of objects with defined magnetic, electrical, and other properties. In this work, composite magnetic filaments for 3D printing with tunable magnetic properties were produced from polylactic acid thermoplastic polymer with the addition of magnetic ferrite particles of different size and chemical composition. The used magnetic particles were cobalt ferrite CoFe2O4 nanoparticles, a mixture of CoFe2O4 and zinc-substituted cobalt ferrite Zn0.3Co0.7Fe2O4 nanoparticles (~20 nm), and barium hexaferrite BaFe12O19 microparticles (<40 µm). The maximum coercivity field HC = 1.6 ± 0.1 kOe was found for the filament sample with the inclusion of 5 wt.% barium hexaferrite microparticles, and the minimum HC was for a filament with a mixture of cobalt and zinc−co... [more]

The combustion of solid biomass in industrial boilers involves a sequence of processes that include heating, drying, devolatilization, and char conversion. To maintain a repeatable and fully controlled environment, and to monitor all the dynamics involved in the phenomena at a real scale, field-scale experiments become necessary to perform investigations. In this way, to evaluate different thermochemical conversion conditions of biomass particles under an oxidative atmosphere, and to quantify the emission of the main gas compounds continuously, a small-scale reactor was developed and presented in this paper. Hence, in this work, larger particles of eucalyptus are burned at 400 and 800 °C under different stoichiometric conditions to understand the differences between different biomass conversion regimes (gasification and combustion). The analysis of the mass loss at the different temperatures was characterized by only two different and consecutive stages for both thermochemical conditio... [more]

Digital technologies for cyber-physical systems are rapidly advancing, and the ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT) has created significant challenges for academic, industrial, and service applications due to high dimensionality, noise contamination, incompleteness, inconsistency, and massive amounts of data [...]

Low-GI biscuits are commonly produced using whole-grain flour, bran, or soluble dietary fibers, giving an undesirable texture. New low-GI biscuits containing dietary fibers and with improved palatability were formulated by substituting 60% of wheat flour (WF) with a native starch (ST) and 15% of WF with a resistant dextrin (RD), a source of dietary fibers. The botanical source of ST was common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum Moench). Biscuits were also made with a single substitution by ST or by RD at the same level for comparison. The firmness of the biscuits was increased with the single substitution by RD due to its small average molecular size and high hygroscopicity, while it was decreased with the single substitution by ST. The double substitution by ST and RD not only produced the texture with the lowest firmness and brittleness, but also led to the lowest in vitro starch digestion rate and total starch digestibility. The human trial confirmed that the biscuits with the double s... [more]

Climate change and the energy crisis are two main problems that humanity is currently facing and that require immediate action [...]

The negative environmental impact of the construction sector has garnered global attention, and as the “primary force” in achieving the “double carbon” target, green development is urgent, and social responsibility practices cannot be postponed. An evolutionary game model was constructed by combining the rank-dependent expected utility (RDEU) theory and the evolutionary game theory to understand the interaction mechanism between participants’ emotions and decisions, taking into account the characteristics of construction enterprises and the public regarding irrational decisions under heterogeneous emotional combinations. The study demonstrates that: (1) there is probability in the choice of rational strategies, and emotion is an irrational factor that can affect strategy choice. (2) The evolutionary trend of the strategy choice of the game subjects is altered by emotional intensity and emotional propensity. The optimism of construction enterprises inhibits their socially responsible pr... [more]

Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) methodology focuses on maintaining safe and reliable operating conditions within industrial practices which is of crucial importance for the profitability of technologies. In this work, the development of an FDI algorithm based on the use of dynamic principal component analysis (DPCA) and the Fréchet distance δdF metric is explored. The three-tank benchmark problem is studied and utilized to demonstrate the performance of the FDI method for six fault types. A DPCA transformation for the system was established, and fault detection was conducted based on the Q statistic. Fault isolation is also of critical importance for proper intervention to mitigate fault effects. To identify the type of detected faults, the fault responses within the PC subspace were analyzed using the δdF metric. The use of the Fréchet distance metric for the isolation of faults combined with DPCA for feature extraction is a novel technique to the best of the authors’ knowledge th... [more]

Due to the growing complexity of industrial processes, it is no longer adequate to perform precise fault detection based solely on the global information of process data. In this study, a silhouette stacked autoencoder (SiSAE) model is constructed for process data by considering both global/local information and silhouette information to depict the link between local/cross-local. Three components comprise the SiSAE model: hierarchical clustering, silhouette loss, and the joint stacked autoencoder (SAE). Hierarchical clustering is used to partition raw data into many blocks, which clarifies the information’s characteristics. To account for silhouette information between data, a silhouette loss function is constructed by raising the inner block’s data distance and decreasing the distance of the cross-center block. Each data block has a properly sized SAE model and is jointly trained via silhouette loss to extract features from all available data. Using the Tennessee Eastman (TE) benchmar... [more]

Rainfall infiltration is one of the main triggers of inner dump slope failure in the process of mining coal. Changes in water content throughout the process of rainfall infiltration have rarely been studied. The reductions in soil strength due to water migration have seldomly been considered in the existing analytical solution of the safety factor (F.S) for unsaturated inner dump slopes in an open-pit mine. In this work, a new mechanical model was developed by improving the conventional analytical solutions of F.S for unsaturated inner dump slopes to accommodate water-induced degradation in the mechanical strength of waste material. Parameter analysis was carried out via a case study of the Shengli #1 open-pit coalmine. The results showed that the wetting front depth increased with increasing rainfall time, and the increasing rate was constant during the non-compressive infiltration stage, while it decreased gradually in the compressive infiltration stage. The F.S of the transition lay... [more]

Improving the dielectric properties of liquid-insulating materials is a current problem in research into the insulation system of a power transformer. Modern optimization of insulating liquids involves the potential use of unique synthetic esters enriched with nanoparticles. This study presents the results of the dielectric response of liquefied gas-based (GTL) insulating liquids during accelerated thermal aging. The dielectric relaxation spectroscopy method was used in the frequency domain to point out power losses as an imaginary part of a complex electric modulus. The relaxation spectra express the validity of applying this complex dielectric parameter. The polarization processes of the base oil alternately change position in the low-frequency band during thermal aging. Fullerene nanofluid undergoes three phases of dielectric loss changes during thermal aging. In the case of magnetic nanofluid, the effect of electric double-layer polarization disappeared after 500 h of thermal aging... [more]

This work attempts to address the quest of removing carbon dioxide from flue gas streams to help preserve the environment. It is based on a model that is able to describe the solid-liquid-vapour and solid-vapour phase equilibria for the ternary system of N2-O2-CO2 at pressures from 5 to 130 bar and over a wide range of temperature (140 to 220 K). Furthermore, a corresponding state-of-the art solid-vapor (SV) CO2 capture/separation unit is developed and introduced in this work. The SV unit was modeled using the Aspen Custom Modeler software by implementing the thermodynamic model developed before. It was then simulated using the Aspen Plus simulator; its performance was studied and analyzed. Moreover, the performance of the unit was optimized and compared to the most conventional corresponding technology used by the industry (i.e., amine-scrubbing). Results proved that for the same output clean gas composition, which contains only 0.3% CO2, the developed state-of-the-art SV unit consume... [more]

The effective exploitation of smart technology in applications helps farmers make better decisions without increasing costs. Agricultural Research Centers (ARCs) are continually updating and producing new datasets from applied research, so the smart model should dynamically address all surrounding agricultural variables and improve its expertise from all available datasets. This research concentrates on sustainable agriculture using Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Therefore, if a new related dataset is created, this new incoming dataset is merged with the existing dataset. The proposed PSO then bypasses the summarization of the dataset. It deletes the least essential and speculative records and keeps the records that are the most influential in the classification process. The summarized dataset is interposed in the training process without re-establishing the system again by modifying the classical ANN. The proposed ANN comprises an ada... [more]

A series of material tests were performed on cryogenic metallic materials meant for liquid hydrogen storage tanks using a 20 K tensile cryostat and an electrochemical hydrogen-charging apparatus. Mechanical evaluation of the electrochemically hydrogen-charged specimens was performed in a tensile cryostat using helium gas at ambient temperature and cryogenic temperature (20 K). The tensile cryostat was equipped with a vacuum jacket and a G-M cryocooler with gaseous helium. Furthermore, the cathodic electrolysis cell used for charging the specimens was adopted for internal hydrogen conditions with a reflux condenser and heating mantle to increase hydrogen diffusivity. The target materials were austenite stainless steel and aluminum alloy, which are suitable for liquefied natural gas and gaseous hydrogen environments. No significant change in the yield strength and flow stress of the hydrogen-charged specimen up to 20% strain was observed. However, changes in tensile strength and elongati... [more]

Global demand for Low-Alcohol Beer (LAB) and Alcohol-Free Beer (AFB) has surged due to flavor attributes, health benefits, and lifestyle changes, prompting efforts for process intensification. This paper aims to offer a detailed modelling basis for LAB manufacturing study and optimisation. A first-principles dynamic model for conventional beer manufacturing has been re-parameterized and used for dynamic simulation of Cold Contact Fermentation (CCF), an effective LAB and AFB production method, with concentrations tracked along plausible temperature manipulation profiles. Parameter estimation is pursued using industrial production data, with a detailed local sensitivity analysis portraying the effect of key parameter variation on sugar consumption, ethanol production, and key flavor component (ethyl acetate and diacetyl) evolution during (and final values after) CCF. Ethyl acetate (esters in general) affecting fruity flavors emerge as most sensitive to CCF conditions.

Fused-filament fabrication is one of the most popular 3D printing techniques for thermoplastic materials because it is easy to use and is low-cost. On the other hand, it has the great limit of being suitable only for developing prototypes, because the printed object generally has low mechanical properties, and this prevents its use in structural applications. To solve this issue, the scientific literature has mainly focused on the optimization of the printing parameters and on performing some post-printing treatments, e.g., annealing, but despite some results being very promising, the topic has not yet been exhaustively investigated. In this paper, a post-printing treatment was studied that was based on two subsequent stages of remelting and compaction within a mold made of a granular material. The material chosen for this study was a green composite made of poly-(lactic acid) and poly-(hydroxyalkanoate) filled with wood fibers. The density, mechanical properties in terms of tension an... [more]

In a laterally asymmetric intake pumping station, the flow direction in the forebay is not consistent with flow in the intake channel. Thus, the adverse flow patterns, such as bias flow, large-scale vortex and asymmetric flow occur frequently in the forebay and sump. Based on the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equation and the RNG k-ε turbulence model, a recent flow pattern in a laterally asymmetric intake pumping station was numerically simulated and analyzed, and effective vortex elimination measures were proposed. For the original scheme, seriously biased flow combined with large-scale vortices were observed in the forebay and several vortices occurred in the sump. To suppress the clash inflow in the south and north intake channel, the “straight diversion pier + curved wing wall” and “straight diversion pier + curved wing wall + V-shaped diversion pier” were installed separately. The” symmetrical 川-shaped diversion pier” and “symmetrical 川-shaped diversion pier + circular co... [more]

Based on CiteSpace software, this paper reviews and analyzes the application articles of acoustic emission in coal from 2010 to 2020. In this paper, CiteSpace software visualizes 453 articles collected in the Web of Science core database. The cooperation networks between different countries, institutions, and authors are used to determine the connection of knowledge in papers. The keyword co-occurrence, keyword co-occurrence time zone map, and keyword clustering are used to determine the hot topics in the field. The cited collaborative network analysis reveals the important literature and the contribution of prominent authors in this area. In the future, for the research of acoustic emission in coal mining, compression tests will still be the main test methods. In terms of time domain parameters of acoustic emission, the application of ring counting, energy, waveform, and signal strength are very mature. The principal problem of acoustic emission location operation will become a focus... [more]

Cold storage facilities consume a considerable amount of energy, especially in hot climates, which can be decreased using thermal insulators to maintain a stable temperature. The primary aim of this research study was to determine the effect of insulation thickness on the energy efficiency and cost savings of exterior walls for cold storage facilities in all climatic zones of Türkiye. To this end, data from the meteorological databases of 81 provinces were analyzed, and four insulation materials (expanded polystyrene, extruded polystyrene, rock wool, and polyurethane) were selected for different cold storage reference temperatures. The spatial distributions of optimal insulation thickness, energy savings, and payback periods were derived using a geographic information system (Ordinary Kriging). The optimum insulation thickness and energy savings were found to be 0.020−0.137 m and 0.030−6.883 USD/m2, respectively. Depending on the insulation material and base temperature, the shortest p... [more]

Yeast produces flavor components as by-products of fermentation. Such components, which account for considerable yeast quality value, may influence cell membrane fluidity and regulate cell size. In this study, yeast cell size was measured using various methods, and cell sizes were characterized for each strain of yeast. Herein, a method for measuring the cell size and automatically acquiring the cell area was proposed using inexpensive methylene blue staining and a versatile digital microscope to automatically acquire the cell area. To evaluate the efficiency, data on cell length and area were compared using the conventional and proposed methods. Additionally, the advantages of automated measurement and the ability to count cell numbers in the future are discussed through the acquisition of cell size data, which would be required for microfabrication and cell fabrication techniques. Although there are various candidate methods for evaluating the properties of each yeast strain, the pre... [more]

Determining residual oil saturation by the single-well chemical tracer test (SWCTT) is of key importance for assessing the potential of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and developing EOR pilot projects. However, the test trials conducted since the first injections of tracer compositions until now have not resulted in a detailed analysis of the selection of candidates for single-well tracers and their limits of applicability in various reservoir conditions. The purpose of this study was to consider the influence of the structure on the kinetic and thermodynamic components of tracers to assess their application’s operating intervals. It is shown that the rate of single-phase and two-phase hydrolysis of the primary partitioning tracer makes it possible to predict the shut-in time by calculating when the tracer is injected at the reservoir temperature. The influence of the tracer structure during the extraction process with an increase in the hydrocarbon chain of the ester in a different range... [more]

The optimal configuration of flexible workshop resources is critical to production efficiency, while disturbances pose significant challenges to the effectiveness of the configuration. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid-driven resource dynamic configuration model and an improved Imperialist Competitive Algorithm hybrid Neighborhood Search (IICA-NS) that incorporates domain knowledge to allocate resources in flexible workshops. First, a hybrid-driven configuration framework is proposed to optimize resource configuration strategies. Then, in the revolutionary step of the Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA), the bottleneck heuristic neighborhood structure is adopted to retain the excellent genes in the imperial so that the updated imperial is closer to the optimal solution; And a population invasion strategy is proposed further to improve the searchability of the ICA algorithm. Finally, the simulation experiments are carried out through production examples on flexible workshop pr... [more]

Because ships are typically operated for more than 25 years after construction, they can be considered mobile factories that require economic maintenance before being scrapped. Therefore, for stable and efficient ship operation, continuous maintenance systems and processes are required. Ships cannot be operated when defects or failures occur in any of the numerous systems configured in them, and research is urgently needed to apply predictive maintenance to propulsion engines with high maintenance costs using machine learning. Therefore, this study analyzes the operation and control characteristics of the propulsion engine, acquires engine data from the alarm monitoring system of the ship in operation, and then preprocesses the data by constructing a data preprocessing algorithm that incorporates the engine control characteristics. In addition, principal component analysis and K-nearest neighbors were used to check whether preprocessing data were classified based on engine control char... [more]

The number of injector holes and the fuel-injection pressure in an internal combustion engine can affect engine performance and exhaust emissions. Conversion of a port-injection gasoline engine to an HCNG direct-injection engine improves engine performance and exhaust emissions. In addition, increasing the injection pressure helps to increase engine performance. In this study, AVL Fire software was used to perform simulation by certain adjustments. The injection pressure was applied in mods of 15, 20, and 25 bars, the injector holes numbers were 3 and 6, the compression ratio changed from 10:1 to 14:1, and the amount of hydrogen enrichment to natural gas was in mods of 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40%. This paper discusses the items above with regard to power, torque, combustion chamber pressure, fuel conversion efficiency, and exhaust emissions. The result determined that increasing the number of injector holes improves the performance engine and reduces CO emission so that the contour plots co... [more]

The electrochemical oxidation (EO) of the breast-cancer drug anastrozole (ANZ) is studied in this work. The role of various operating parameters, such as current density (6.25 and 12.5 mA cm−2), pH (3−10), ANZ concentration (0.5−2 mg L−1), nature of supporting electrolytes, water composition, and water matrix, have been evaluated. ANZ removal of 82.4% was achieved at 1 mg L−1 initial concentration after 90 min of reaction at 6.25 mA cm−2 and 0.1 M Na2SO4. The degradation follows pseudo-first-order kinetics with the apparent rate constant, kapp, equal to 0.022 min−1. The kapp increases with increasing current density and decreasing solution pH. The addition of chloride in the range 0−250 mg L−1 positively affects the removal of ANZ. However, chloride concentrations above 250 mg L−1 have a detrimental effect. The presence of bicarbonate or organic matter has a slightly negative but not significant effect on the process. The EO of ANZ is compared to its degradation by solar photo-Fenton,... [more]