Investigation of optimal thermal parameters for essential oils extraction using laboratory and solar distillation systems

Essential oils are used in medicines, foods, fragrances, perfumery and cosmetics etc.  Different methods are used for essential oils extraction.  Out of all these methods, distillation methods have advantage of extracting refine essence of the plant materials and herbs by evaporating volatile components.  The main object of the research is to investigate optimal thermal parameters and to develop simple and best methodologies for easy adaptation of these techniques for decentralized applications.  The research for essential oils extraction was conducted under laboratory conditions and by using solar energy.  For each laboratory experiment, equal weights of the herbs were used.  The energy consumption for different herbs was recorded with the help of energy meters and process curves were drawn for comparison.  The heat energy consumption to extract one milliliter of essential oil from Cloves buds, Fennel, Cumin, Patchouli, Cassia and Orange barks was found to be 0.133, 0.503, 0.574, 2.716, 2.807 kWh respectively.  The methodology and thermal parameters provide useful information regarding temperature and energy requirements to process different herbs.  On the basis of laboratory results, a de-centralized solar distillation system was developed using Scheffler reflector (8 m2 aperture area) and evaluated.  The power and system efficiency of solar based system was found to be 1.58 kW and 43.25% respectively.  Successful results were obtained for essential oils extraction from herbs by using solar energy.  These results were found similar to that of laboratory showing that the solar energy can be effectively used for the distillation of essential oils.Keywords: Essential oils, herbs, scheffler reflector, solar distillation Citation: Munir A., and O. Hensel.  Investigation of optimal thermal parameters for essential oils extraction using laboratory and solar distillation systems.  Agric Eng Int: CIGR Journal, 2010, 12(1): 107-114

Quantum repeaters and quantum key distribution: analysis of secret key rates

We analyze various prominent quantum repeater protocols in the context of long-distance quantum key distribution. These protocols are the original quantum repeater proposal by Briegel, D\"ur, Cirac and Zoller, the so-called hybrid quantum repeater using optical coherent states dispersively interacting with atomic spin qubits, and the Duan-Lukin-Cirac-Zoller-type repeater using atomic ensembles together with linear optics and, in its most recent extension, heralded qubit amplifiers. For our analysis, we investigate the most important experimental parameters of every repeater component and find their minimally required values for obtaining a nonzero secret key. Additionally, we examine in detail the impact of device imperfections on the final secret key rate and on the optimal number of rounds of distillation when the entangled states are purified right after their initial distribution.Comment: Published versio

Extraction of Essential Oil Using Steam Distillation

A large number of herb materials contain Essential Oils with extensive bioactivities. Acknowledging the importance of plants and its medicinal value, extraction of Essential Oil had been done using Steam Distillation method. In this project Steam Distillation was used to extract oil from different plant materials like eucalyptus leaves, curry leaves, hibiscus leaves, lemon leaves, marigold flowers, rose flowers, orange peels etc. Research has confirmed centuries of practical use of essential oils, and we now know that the 'fragrant pharmacy' contains compounds with an extremely broad range of biochemical effects. Essential oils are so termed as they are believed to represent the very essence of odor and flavor. The recovery of Essential Oil (the value added product) from the raw botanical starting material is very important since the quality of the oil is greatly influenced during this step. There are a variety of methods for obtaining volatile oils from plants. Steam distillation method was found to be one of the promising techniques for the extraction of essential oil from plants as reputable distiller will preserve the original qualities of the plant. The distillation was conducted in Clevenger apparatus in which boiling, condensing and decantation was done. Analysis of Essential oil was done using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer apparatus, which gives evaluates Essential Oil qualitatively and quantitatively. Volume of Essential Oil obtained was changing w.r.t temperature and time of heating

Intercomparison of soil pore water extraction methods for stable isotope analysis

Funded by NSERC Discovery Grant U.S. Forest Service U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies OfficePeer reviewedPostprin

Verifying Temporal Properties of Reactive Systems by Transformation

We show how program transformation techniques can be used for the verification of both safety and liveness properties of reactive systems. In particular, we show how the program transformation technique distillation can be used to transform reactive systems specified in a functional language into a simplified form that can subsequently be analysed to verify temporal properties of the systems. Example systems which are intended to model mutual exclusion are analysed using these techniques with respect to both safety (mutual exclusion) and liveness (non-starvation), with the errors they contain being correctly identified.Comment: In Proceedings VPT 2015, arXiv:1512.02215. This work was supported, in part, by Science Foundation Ireland grant 10/CE/I1855 to Lero - the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre (www.lero.ie), and by the School of Computing, Dublin City Universit

Incremental Learning of Object Detectors without Catastrophic Forgetting

Despite their success for object detection, convolutional neural networks are ill-equipped for incremental learning, i.e., adapting the original model trained on a set of classes to additionally detect objects of new classes, in the absence of the initial training data. They suffer from "catastrophic forgetting" - an abrupt degradation of performance on the original set of classes, when the training objective is adapted to the new classes. We present a method to address this issue, and learn object detectors incrementally, when neither the original training data nor annotations for the original classes in the new training set are available. The core of our proposed solution is a loss function to balance the interplay between predictions on the new classes and a new distillation loss which minimizes the discrepancy between responses for old classes from the original and the updated networks. This incremental learning can be performed multiple times, for a new set of classes in each step, with a moderate drop in performance compared to the baseline network trained on the ensemble of data. We present object detection results on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and COCO datasets, along with a detailed empirical analysis of the approach.Comment: To appear in ICCV 201

Extraction of essential oil and its applications

Essential oils are highly concentrated substances extracted from flowers, leaves, stems, roots, seeds, barks, resins, or fruit rinds. These oils are often used for their flavor and their therapeutic or odoriferous properties, in a wide selection of products such as foods, medicines, and cosmetics. Extraction of essential oils is one of the most time- and effortconsuming processes. The way in which oils are extracted from plants is important because some processes use solvents that can destroy the therapeutic properties. There are wide number of ways to extract the Essential oil but the quality never remains the same. Here we are using the “Steam Distillation” method for extraction which is the cheapest way for the extraction of Oils from the different parts of the plants. In this process steam is allowed to pass through the extraction chamber which contains plant matter. When steam passes through the herb material under pressure which softens the cells and allows the essential oil to escape in vapor form. The vapour allows to pass through condenser and oil is collected in separating funnel and separated. Composition data for Eucalyptus oil were studied and found the Eucalyptus oil can be used as cosolvent which results in depression of cloud point temperature