Study of phase behavior and Congo red dye partitioning in aqueous two-phase systems composed of hydrophilic alcohols (1-propanol/ 1-butanol) and sodium salts

ABSTRACT

The partitioning of the Congo red dye in ATPSs formed by alcohols (1-butanol, 1-propanol)/sodium salts was considered. Binodal and the LLE data were experimentally determined at 298.15 K. The salting-out abilities of the salts follow the order Na₃C₆H₅O₇ > NaH₂PO₄ > C₂H₃ O₂Na. The phase-forming abilities of the alcohols follow the order: 1-butanol > 1-propanol. The four-parameter equation was applied to correlate the binodal curves data. Therefore, The Bancroft and Othmer-Tobias equations were used to prove the reliability of the corresponding LLE data. ATPS composed of 6.5% of 1-butanol and 20% of Na₃C₆H₅O₇ had the highest values of extraction by the yield of 98.54%.     

Functionalized Nano Graphene Platelets as Green Catalyst to Synthesize New and Known Benzoyl-1,4-diazanaphthalene and Study of Their Local Aromaticity

Functionalized graphene has been prepared and employed for the solvent-free synthesis of some novel and known benzoyl-1,4-diazanaphthalene from the condensation of various arylglyoxals with 4-bezoyl-1,2-phenylenediamine. Catalyst loads as low as 0.003 g could be used leading to high yields of pure products. Magnetic, geometry, and electronically based indices have been also employed to investigate the correlation between aromaticity variation in new formed ring (ring A) and yield of reaction.     

A new restricted boltzmann machine training algorithm for image restoration

Multimedia Tools and Applications - A variety of approaches have been proposed for addressing different image restoration challenges. Recently, deep generative models were one of the mostly used...     

Fluctuations in Economic and Activity and Stabilization Policies in the CIS

In this study, a highly flexible form of nonlinear time series models called artificial neural networks (ANNs) are employed to predict fluctuations in economic activity in selected members (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan) of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) using macroeconomic time series [treasury bill rate (T-bill), long term bond rate (BondLT), money supply (MS), industrial production (IP), spread (10-year treasury bond rate less 3-month treasury bill rate), BRTB (bank rate less 3-month treasury bill rate), and GDP growth rate]. Forecasting recessions being very important though challenging, recessions in the selected countries are modeled recursively 1–10 quarters ahead out-of-sample using ANNs in conjunction with macroeconomic time series for all the countries. The out-of-sample forecast results show that in general no single macroeconomic variable employed appears to be useful for predicting recessions in any of the series. However, for Armenia, the treasury bill rate, industrial production, money supply, and the spread (the yield curve) are candidate variables for predicting recessions 1–10 quarters ahead. For Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, the treasury bill rate and money supply series are candidate variables for predicting recessions 1–10 quarters ahead.     

An artificial neural network based heuristic for flow shop scheduling problems

The objective of this paper is to find a sequence of jobs in the flow shop to minimize makespan. A feed forward back propagation neural network is used to solve the problem. The network is trained with the optimal sequences of completely enumerated five, six and seven jobs, ten machine problem and this trained network is then used to solve the problem with greater number of jobs. The sequence obtained using artificial neural network (ANN) is given as the initial sequence to a heuristic proposed by Suliman and also to genetic algorithm (GA) as one of the sequences of the population for further improvement. The approaches are referred as ANN-Suliman heuristic and ANN-GA heuristic respectively. Makespan of the sequences obtained by these heuristics are compared with the makespan of the sequences obtained using the heuristic proposed by Nawaz, Enscore and Ham (NEH) and Suliman Heuristic initialized with Campbell Dudek and Smith (CDS) heuristic called as CDS-Suliman approach. It is found that the ANN-GA and ANN-Suliman heuristic approaches perform better than NEH and CDS-Suliman heuristics for the problems considered.     

Solving fuzzy differential equations by differential transformation method

An extension of the differential transformation method (DTM), which is an analytical-numerical method for solving the fuzzy differential equation (FDE), is given. The concept of generalised H-differentiability is used. This concept is based on an enlargement of the class of differentiable fuzzy mappings; to define this, the lateral Hukuhara derivatives are considered. The proposed algorithm is illustrated by numerical examples, and some error comparisons are made with other methods for solving a FDE.     

Residence Time Distribution (RTD) of Particulate Foods in a Continuous Flow Pilot-Scale Ohmic Heater

ABSTRACT:  The residence time distribution (RTD) of a model particulate–fluid mixture (potato in starch solution) in the ohmic heater in a continuous sterilization process was measured using a radio frequency identification (RFID) methodology. The effect of solid concentration and the rotational speed of the agitators on the RTD were studied. The velocity of the fastest particle was 1.62 times the mean product velocity. In general, particle velocity was found to be greater than the product bulk average velocity. Mean particle residence time (MPRT) increased with an increase in the rotational speed of the agitators ( P  < 0.05), and no particular trend was observed between the MPRT and the solid concentration. The distribution curves  E  (θ) were skewed to the right suggesting slow moving zones in the system.