Contact Interaction of Turbine Blade Interlock Elements Under Creep

Strength of Materials - The effect of the creep of materials of a structure on the nature of the contact interaction between its elements during long-term operation is investigated. The problem of...     

Novel pearl millet couscous process for West African markets using a low-cost single-screw extruder

Traditional West African pearl millet couscous products are popular; however, their preparation is laborious, time-consuming and energy-demanding, involving agglomeration, steaming, drying and sieving steps. In this study, a process was developed to produce millet couscous using a high pressure, high temperature and low-cost single-screw extruder. The innovation was to directly process the cooked low-moisture extrudate to a couscous product by drying and milling to the appropriate particle size (ranging between 1 and 2 mm). Throughput for the traditional process as prepared for commercial sale is 50 kg per day, but with the same amount of labour, the extrusion process yields ~350 kg per day. A consumer sensory study held in Niamey (Niger) showed that the extruded millet couscous was comparable to traditional couscous, though this was dependent on selection of the proper millet variety. This novel extrusion process could stimulate small- to medium-scale manufacturing of couscous and couscous-type products in West Africa.     

Adaptive Group Teaching Based Clustering and Data Aggregation with Routing in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Personal Communications - Nowadays, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is enhancing for different applications. Simultaneously, energy consumption for processing the tasks in most of the...     

ResearchGate and Google Scholar: how much do they differ in publications,citations and different metrics and why?

ResearchGate has emerged as a popular professional network for scientists and researchers in a very short span. Similar to Google Scholar, the ResearchGate indexing uses an automatic crawling algorithm that extracts bibliographic data, citations, and other information about scholarly articles from various sources. However, it has been observed that the two platforms often show different publication and citation data for the same institutions, journals, and authors. While several previous studies analysed different aspects of ResearchGate and Google Scholar, the quantum of differences in publications, citations, and metrics between the two and the probable reasons for the same are not explored much. This article, therefore, attempts to bridge this research gap by analysing and measuring the differences in publications, citations, and different metrics of the two platforms for a large data set of highly cited authors. The results indicate that there are significantly high differences in publications and citations for the same authors captured by the two platforms, with Google Scholar having higher counts for a vast majority of the cases. The different metrics computed by the two platforms also differ in their values, showing different degrees of correlation. The coverage policy, indexing errors, author attribution mechanism, and strategy to deal with predatory publishing are found to be the main probable reasons for the differences in the two platforms.

     

Fresh beef tumbling at different post-mortem times to improve tenderness and proteolytic features of M. longissimus lumborum

The aim of this study was to determine the effects of tumbling at different post-mortem times on the proteolytic features and quality attributes of beef loins (M. longissimus lumborum). Loins (n = 12) were cut into 4 sections and assigned to tumbling at 1, 6 or 11 days post-mortem or non-tumbled control. Upon tumbling, additional ageing was applied to a common post-mortem time of 16 days. In general, tumbling had no considerable impacts on water-holding ability of samples. Tumbling resulted in an immediate decrease in shear force values (WBSF) of beef samples. Tumbling at 1 day post-mortem with no ageing had similar WBSF compared to the non-tumbled controls at 16 days (P > 0.05). With ageing, tumbling increased amounts of protein degradation, myofibrillar fragmentation and calpain-1 autolysis of samples. These results suggest that early post-mortem tumbling coupled with ageing can synergistically impact the tenderness development of beef loins and shorten the necessary ageing period.     

Can regional policies shape migration flows?

Our empirical analysis focuses on the effect of regional policies on migration attraction factors in Europe. We employ a regression discontinuity design to assess the causal relationship between the reception of large amounts of public funds and migration flows in the EU-15 regions. In highly-subsidised regions, we find a large increase in the share of foreign citizens from less-developed countries when compared to low-subsidised regions with similar pre-treatment characteristics. The analysis shows that such an increase is due to the positive impact of the European regional policy on job market opportunities as well as the improvement of public goods supply.     

Depicting the role of gas-solid interactions on the hydrodynamics of converging pneumatic riser

The understanding of the flow characteristics and effect of gas-solid interactions in pneumatic risers is fundamental to investigate to ensure effective design cost-effective operation. Thus, to understand the effect of gas-solid interactions on the hydrodynamics of newly proposed conversing risers, this study mainly focused on predicting pressure drop in the dilute phase pneumatic conveying system. The experiments were conducted in a converging riser having a convergence angle of 0.2693°. Various solid particles such as sago, black mustard, and alumina have been considered to study the effect of particle sizes and density on the pressure drop. The experimental outcomes indicate that the total pressure drop increases with an increase in the solid density and gas mass flow rate. Moreover, smaller particle sizes are also increased the pressure drop. An empirical correlation is developed for the prediction of total pressure drop ΔP_T in converging pneumatic riser via dimensional analysis. All dependent variables such as particle and air density, drag force, acceleration due to gravity, the mass flow rate of air and particle, the diameter of particle and converging riser, the height of converging riser were considered to develop the empirical correlation. The established relationship is tested, and experimental data have been fitted for its validation. The estimated relative error of less than 0.05 proved the significance of the developed correlation. Hence, it can be stated that the established relationship is useful in studying the effects of various parameters on the pressure drop across the length of the conversing riser.