Effect of storage, food processing and novel extraction technologies on onions flavonoid content: A review

peer-reviewedOnions play an important part in the daily diet for most populations around the world owing to their nutritional composition and their unique capacity to naturally flavor dishes. Onions contain quercetin and its derivatives - the predominant flavonoid in onions that exert a great contribution to the effective bioactive properties of onion, including its derived products. The present paper comprehensively reviewed flavonoids (with a specific focus on quercetin in onions): their chemical composition, distribution, bioactivities in onion, and impacting factors with a focus on how they can be affected by various post-harvest conditions (storage and food processing). In addition, research on the extraction of flavonoid compounds from onions using a number of novel technologies was also reviewed

Synthesis of High-Purity SnO 2

This paper presents a new method to synthesize high-purity single-crystalline SnO2 nanobelts with rutile structure. The purity, morphology, crystal structure, and sizes of the as-grown SnO2 nanobelts are characterized by X-ray diffraction, energy-dispersive X-ray analysis, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and Raman-scattering spectroscopy. The scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy reveal tetragonal SnO2 nanobelts of 50–120 nm in width, 20–50 nm in thickness, and 2–10 μm in length. The three observed Raman peaks at 475, 633, and 774 cm−1 indicate the typical rutile structure of the SnO2, which is in agreement with the X-ray diffraction results, and other peaks of impurity are not found. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy demonstrates that the nanobelts have a high degree of crystallinity, without typical imperfects in it. And the growth mechanism of the SnO2 nanobelts is discussed

MIMN-DPP: Maximum-information and minimum-noise determinantal point processes for unsupervised hyperspectral band selection

Band selection plays an important role in hyperspectral imaging for reducing the data and improving the efficiency of data acquisition and analysis whilst significantly lowering the cost of the imaging system. Without the category labels, it is challenging to select an effective and low-redundancy band subset. In this paper, a new unsupervised band selection algorithm is proposed based on a new band search criterion and an improved Determinantal Point Processes (DPP). First, to preserve the original information of hyperspectral image, a novel band search criterion is designed for searching the bands with high information entropy and low noise. Unfortunately, finding the optimal solution based on the search criteria to select a low-redundancy band subset is a NP-hard problem. To solve this problem, we consider the correlation of bands from both original hyperspectral image and its spatial information to construct a double-graph model to describe the relationship between spectral bands. Besides, an improved DPP algorithm is proposed for the approximate search of a low-redundancy band subset from the double-graph model. Experiment results on several well-known datasets show that the proposed optical band selection algorithm achieves better performance than many other state-of-the-art methods

Parametric investigation on an industrial electromagnetic continuous casting mould performance

This research aimed at conducting a quantitative investigation of process parameters on the magnetic field contribution in an electromagnetic continuous casting mould. The Taguchi method (4 factors and 3 factor value levels: L9 orthogonal array) was adopted to design matrix of the simulation runs and the analysis of variance was used to evaluate the contributions of each control factor. The simulations were conducted based on the finite element method and the numerical set-up was validated by the designed experiment. The results showed that the applied alternating current magnitude contributed most (76.64%) to the magnetic field level in the mould, compared to the other control factors. It was followed by the slit length (17.72%), the alternating current frequency (4.17%) and the slit width (1.57%)