Effects of ohmic heating on technological properties of whole egg

The aim of this work was to study the effects of different ohmic heating conditions on color, rheology, foaming, and gelling properties of whole egg. Industrial products treated by conventional heat pasteurization and the corresponding raw materials were also evaluated. Ohmic treatments accomplished in a static cell (65.5 \ub0C 73 min, 70 \ub0C 71 min, and 67 \ub0C 74.5 min) increased whole egg apparent viscosity (up to 190%), but also foam overrun (up to 28%) and gel hardness (up to 15%). The performance improvement was confirmed by treatments carried out in a continuous pilot plant (71 \ub0C 70.6 min, 68 \ub0C 71.4 min) and the products resulted stable during storage at 4 \ub0C for 30 days. In conclusion, this study demonstrated that ohmic heating is a suitable alternative to conventional pasteurization. Low temperature treatments are preferable to avoid possible rheological issues due to protein denaturation. Industrial relevance: Whole egg is a protein ingredient with multiple technological properties, used in many foods. Due to safety reasons, food manufacturers often use pasteurized liquid egg products, microbiologically safer and easier to handle with respect to shell eggs. In order to satisfy the required sanitary levels for liquid egg products, thermal pasteurization treatments are needed. However, since egg proteins are very sensitive to high temperatures, attention must be paid to avoid coagulation entailing deleterious effects against egg quality. In this study, different ohmic heating treatments were evaluated as milder alternatives to conventional pasteurization. The lab- and pilot-scale experiments and the subsequent statistical analyses of the obtained results contributed to assess the effects of the different ohmic treatments on technological features (e.g. color, rheology, foaming, and gelling properties) of liquid whole egg. This study demonstrated that ohmic heating is a suitable technology for whole egg treatment, paving the way for new opportunities in order to produce safe food ingredients with improved technological functionalities

3D AUDIO-VISUAL SPEAKER TRACKING WITH AN ADAPTIVE PARTICLE FILTER

reserved4siWe propose an audio-visual fusion algorithm for 3D speaker tracking from a localised multi-modal sensor platform composed of a camera and a small microphone array. After extracting audio-visual cues from individual modalities we fuse them adaptively using their reliability in a particle filter framework. The reliability of the audio signal is measured based on the maximum Global Coherence Field (GCF) peak value at each frame. The visual reliability is based on colour-histogram matching with detection results compared with a reference image in the RGB space. Experiments on the AV16.3 dataset show that the proposed adaptive audio-visual tracker outperforms both the individual modalities and a classical approach with fixed parameters in terms of tracking accuracy.Qian, Xinyuan; Brutti, Alessio; Omologo, Maurizio; Cavallaro, AndreaQian, Xinyuan; Brutti, Alessio; Omologo, Maurizio; Cavallaro, Andre

Some Considerations about the Anodic Limit of Ionic Liquids Obtained by Means of DFT Calculations

Ionic liquids are good candidates as the main component of safe electrolytes for high-energy lithium-ion batteries. The identification of a reliable algorithm to estimate the electrochemical stability of ionic liquids can greatly speed up the discovery of suitable anions able to sustain high potentials. In this work, we critically assess the linear dependence of the anodic limit from the HOMO level of 27 anions, whose performances have been experimentally investigated in the previous literature. A limited r Pearson’s value of ≈0.7 is found even with the most computationally demanding DFT functionals. A different model considering vertical transitions in a vacuum between the charged state and the neutral molecule is also exploited. In this case, the best-performing functional (M08-HX) provides a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 1.61 V2 on the 27 anions here considered. The ions which give the largest deviations are those with a large value of the solvation energy, and therefore, an empirical model that linearly combines the anodic limit calculated by vertical transitions in a vacuum and in a medium with a weight dependent on the solvation energy is proposed for the first time. This empirical method can decrease the MSE to 1.29 V2 but still provides an r Pearson’s value of ≈0.72

Chromium-Doped Nickel Cobaltite Nanoneedles as a Cathodic Material for Li-O2Cells: An X-ray Photoemission and Photoabsorption Spectroscopy Investigation

Li-O2 redox chemistry in aprotic electrolytes is promising to boost the performance of secondary batteries, displaying a theoretical energy density more than an order of magnitude higher than the present state-of-the-art Li-ion technology. However, the electrochemical Li2O2 formation and dissolution occur in parallel with the so-called ORR and OER (i.e., oxygen reduction reaction and oxygen evolution reaction, respectively), thus requiring suitable electrocatalysts to promote the redox kinetics both in discharge and charge. Here, we discuss the electronic structure and the surface chemistry of a nanoneedle-structured nickel cobaltite doped with chromium as a heterogeneous electrocatalyst for aprotic Li-O2 cells. A detailed experimental study of the evolution of occupied and unoccupied electronic states of the material from the pristine to a post-mortem condition after operation as a cathode in a Li-O2 cell is undertaken via ex situ X-ray photoemission (X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, XPS) and photoabsorption (near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure NEXAFS) spectroscopies. This analysis proved the mixed valence state of the transition metals, their coordination environment within the cobaltite matrix, and their evolution after operation in the cell. In particular, spectroscopic fingerprints of deposition/dissolution phenomena due to solvent degradation were found in the C 1s XP spectra after operation in the Li-O2 cell, together with an involvement of Ni2+/3+ centers in the electrocatalytic processes of oxygen reduction and evolution, enhanced in the presence of a Cr(III) dopant

Audio-visual tracking of concurrent speakers

Audio-visual tracking of an unknown number of concurrent speakers in 3D is a challenging task, especially when sound and video are collected with a compact sensing platform. In this paper, we propose a tracker that builds on generative and discriminative audio-visual likelihood models formulated in a particle filtering framework. We localize multiple concurrent speakers with a de-emphasized acoustic map assisted by the image detection-derived 3D video observations. The 3D multimodal observations are either assigned to existing tracks for discriminative likelihood computation or used to initialize new tracks. The generative likelihoods rely on color distribution of the target and the de-emphasized acoustic map value. Experiments on AV16.3 and CAV3D datasets show that the proposed tracker outperforms the uni-modal trackers and the state-of-the-art approaches both in 3D and on the image plane

Super hygroscopic non-stoichiometric cerium oxide particles as electrode component for PEM fuel cells

The design of highly efficient promoters for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is an important challenge in the large-scale distribution of proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. Hygroscopic cerium oxide (CeO2) is here proposed as co-catalyst in combination with Pt. Physical chemical characterizations, by means of X-ray diffraction, vibrational spectroscopy, morphological and thermal analyses, were carried out, demonstrating high water affinity of the synthesized CeO2 nanoparticles. Composite catalysts (i. e., Pt : CeO2 1 : 0.5 and 1 : 1 wt:wt), were studied by either rotating disk electrode (RDE) and fuel cell tests performed at 80 °C and 110 °C. Interestingly, the cell adopting the Pt : CeO2 1 : 0.5 catalyst enabled the achievement of high power densities reaching ∼80 and ∼35 mW cm−2 under low relative humidity and high temperatures. This result demonstrates that tuning material surface properties (e. g. oxygen vacancies) could significantly boost the electrochemical performance of cathodes as a combined result of optimized water retention and improved ORR kinetic

Dynamics of Mn3+ in off-stoichiometric LiMn1.5Ni0.5O4

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ConflictNET: End-to-End Learning for Speech-Based Conflict Intensity Estimation

Computational paralinguistics aims to infer human emotions, personality traits and behavioural patterns from speech signals. In particular, verbal conflict is an important example of human-interaction behaviour, whose detection would enable monitoring and feedback in a variety of applications. The majority of methods for detection and intensity estimation of verbal conflict apply off-the-shelf classifiers/regressors to generic hand-crafted acoustic features. Generating conflict-specific features requires refinement steps and the availability of metadata, such as the number of speakers and their speech overlap duration. Moreover, most techniques treat feature extraction and regression as independent modules, which require separate training and parameter tuning. To address these limitations, we propose the first end-to-end convolutional-recurrent neural network architecture that learns conflict-specific features directly from raw speech waveforms, without using explicit domain knowledge or metadata. Additionally, to selectively focus the model on portions of speech containing verbal conflict instances, we include a global attention interface that learns the alignment between layers of the recurrent network. Experimental results on the SSPNet Conflict Corpus show that our end-to-end architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of Pearson Correlation Coefficient

Clinical experience with power-injectable PICCs in intensive care patients

Introduction: In the ICU, peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs) may be an alternative option to standard central venous catheters, particularly in patients with coagulation disorders or at high risk for infection. Some limits of PICCs (such as low flow rates) may be overcome with the use of power-injectable catheters.Methods: We retrospectively reviewed all of the power-injectable PICCs inserted in adult and pediatric patients in the ICU during a 12-month period, focusing on the rate of complications at insertion and during maintenance.Results: We collected 89 power-injectable PICCs (in adults and in children), both multiple and single lumen. All insertions were successful. There were no major complications at insertion and no episodes of catheter-related bloodstream infection. Non-infective complications during management were not clinically significant. There was one episode of symptomatic thrombosis during the stay in the ICU and one episode after transfer of a patient to a non-intensive ward.Conclusion: Power-injectable PICCs have many advantages in the ICU: they can be used as multipurpose central lines for any type of infusion including high-flow infusion, for hemodynamic monitoring, and for high-pressure injection of contrast media during radiological procedures. Their insertion is successful in 100% of cases and is not associated with significant risks, even in patients with coagulation disorders. Their maintenance is associated with an extremely low rate of infective and non-infective complications. © 2012 Pittiruti et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd