Legumes as basic ingredients in the production of dairy-free cheese alternatives: a review

Research into dairy-free alternative products, whether plant-based or cell-based, is growing fast and the food industry is facing a new challenge of creating innovative, nutritious, accessible, and natural dairy-free cheese alternatives. The market demand for these products is continuing to increase owing to more people choosing to reduce or eliminate meat and dairy products from their diet for health, environmental sustainability, and/or ethical reasons. This review investigates the current status of dairy product alternatives. Legume proteins have good technological properties and are cheap, which gives them a strong commercial potential to be used in plant-based cheese-like products. However, few legume proteins have been explored in the formulation, development, and manufacture of a fully dairy-free cheese because of their undesirable properties: heat stable anti-nutritional factors and a beany flavor. These can be alleviated by novel or traditional and economical techniques. The improvement and diversification of the formulation of legume-based cheese alternatives is strongly suggested as a low-cost step towards more sustainable food chains. © 2021 The Authors. Journal of The Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society of Chemical Industry

Optical second harmonic generation in Yttrium Aluminum Borate single crystals (theoretical simulation and experiment)

Experimental measurements of the second order susceptibilities for the second harmonic generation are reported for YAl3(BO3)4 (YAB) single crystals for the two principal tensor components xyz and yyy. First principles calculation of the linear and nonlinear optical susceptibilities for Yttrium Aluminum Borate YAl3(BO3)4 (YAB) crystal have been carried out within a framework of the full-potential linear augmented plane wave (FP-LAPW) method. Our calculations show a large anisotropy of the linear and nonlinear optical susceptibilities. The observed dependences of the second order susceptibilities for the static frequency limit and for the frequency may be a consequence of different contribution of electron-phonon interactions. The imaginary parts of the second order SHG susceptibility chi_{123}^{(2)}(omega), chi_{112}^{(2)}(omega), chi_{222}^{(2)}(omega), and chi_{213}^{(2)}(omega) are evaluated. We find that the 2(omega) inter-band and intra-band contributions to the real and imaginary parts of chi_{ijk}^{(2)}\l(omega) show opposite signs. The calculated second order susceptibilities are in reasonably good agreement with the experimental measurements.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figure

Full-Duplex Bidirectional Indoor Steerable OWC System using Orthogonal Polarization States

To avoid beam-steering at users, we propose the use of same wavelength for down and upstream to realize a full-duplex bidirectional architecture using off-the-shelf XFP transceivers. Symmetric data rate of 10 Gbps is experimentally demonstrated by implementing orthogonal polarization states to mitigate the reflection crosstalk.</p

Full-Duplex Bidirectional Indoor Steerable OWC System using Orthogonal Polarization States

To avoid beam-steering at users, we propose the use of same wavelength for down and upstream to realize a full-duplex bidirectional architecture using off-the-shelf XFP transceivers. Symmetric data rate of 10 Gbps is experimentally demonstrated by implementing orthogonal polarization states to mitigate the reflection crosstalk

Auto-Aligned OWC Receiver for Indoor Mobile Users using Gradient Descent Algorithm

We developed a new auto-aligned optical wireless receiver for indoor mobile users using a dual-axis actuator, a motion sensor, and a feedback control. Experiments demonstrate seamless transmission at normal walking speeds with <400ms alignment time

X-ray fluorescence analysis of coastal sediments of Tamil Nadu with a statistical approach

X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy is applied to determine the concentration of essential and toxic heavy metals such as silicon (Si), potassium (K), calcium (Ca), titanium (Ti), iron (Fe), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), nickel (Ni), and lead (Pb) in the sediments of Kovalam coastal area, Tamil Nadu, India. Fe (599280 ppm), an essential heavy metal/mineral shows the highest average concentration, followed by Si (181593 ppm), Ca (130913 ppm), K (99673 ppm), Ti (77620 ppm), Cu (64 ppm), Ni (43 ppm), Pb (20 ppm), and Zn (8 ppm). Heavy metal contamination was assessed using various pollution indicators such as the geo-accumulation index (Igeo), contamination factor (CF), pollution load index (PLI), and enrichment factor (EF). Si, K, Ca, Ti, Fe, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn had mean Igeo values of −1.29, 1.54, 1.07, 3.59, 3.19, 0.64, −1.14, −0.22, and −3.70, respectively. Except for Ti (19.36) and Fe (13.87), the average CF value for determined heavy metals was significantly low. The PLI value ranges from 1.47 to 2.46. Heavy metal EF values are greater than 1 in all sampling locations. Multivariate statistical analyses such as Pearson correlation analysis, cluster analysis, and principal component analysis are performed to identify the sources of heavy metals in the studied sediment samples. The findings indicate that anthropogenic sources such as boating and tourism activities have a probable contribution on the enrichment of K, Ca, Ti, Fe, Cu, and Pb in sediments, necessitating more attention in monitoring of toxic heavy metals (such as Pb) contamination in the coastal environment

Accurate indoor localization for beam-steered OWC system using optical camera

Using a low-cost optical camera, we demonstrated an accurate and fast localization technique for ultra-high capacity beam-steered optical wireless communication. Multiple user devices have been localized simultaneously within 25ms for less than 5mm accuracy at a reach beyond 3m