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Experimental infrared dryer was used to study the effect of rough rice temperature and air velocity on grain crack during infrared radiation and convection drying. Factorial experiment with Completely Randomize Block design was applied to the experiment at three temperature levels of 45, 60 and 75°C (equal to radiation intensities of 0.19, 0.39 and 0.58 W/cm2) and two inlet air velocity levels of 0.4 and 0.6 m/s. The result showed that the rough rice temperature (radiation intensity) and air velocity had significant effect on crack losses. Increasing the radiation intensity and decreasing air velocity caused to increase of crack percentage during drying of rough rice samples. The comparison of infrared and convectional drying method showed that grain cracks with infrared drying energy at 60 and 75 °C (0.39 and 0.58 W/cm2) were less than that with convection drying at the same temperatures. But it did not have a significant difference at 45 °C (0.19 W/cm2). The mathematical model relationship of grain crack percentage with rough rice temperature and air flow velocity was derived. Also the result show that the effect of rough rice temperature was more than air velocity on grain crack in infrared radiation drying.

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Aims: Carotenoids are a vast group of lipid-soluble pigments, which are produced by variety of microorganisms. The aim of this study was to compare the production of carotenoid pigments by prokaryotic isolates of Iranian saline ecosystems and identify superior isolate.
Materials & Methods: In this the experimental study, isolates were purified by culture-based methods and carotenoid extracts were analyzed by spectrophotometry in wavelength region of 400nm to 600nm. The total carotenoid content was estimated by spectrophotometry at λ_max (490nm). Identity of bands was detremined by purification of bands by Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) and analysis by High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR).
Findings: Fourty-three isolates were obtained. Eight isolates were halotolerant bacteria, 8 isolates were moderately halophile, and 27 isolates were extremely halophile. All of the strains were capable of producing carotenoid compounds. Isolate M24 with 2054μg/g production was selected as superior isolate. Thin layer chromatography exhibited 6 colored bands in colored extract of this strain and the most concentrated band was purified. After purification by TLC and HPLC, spectrophotometry in UV range showed two pics at 530nm and 465nm as the highest absorbances, which were similar to UV absorbance of α-bacterioruberin. Phylogenetic analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequence of strain M24 showed that this strain had 98% similarity with Haloarcula amylolytica BD-3.
Conclusion: From Iranian Saline Ecosystems, 43 isolates are obtained. Eight isolates are halotolerant bacteria, 8 isolates are moderately halophile, and 27 isolates are extremely halophile. All of the isolates are capable of producing carotenoid compounds. Strain M24 is superior isolate, having 98% similarity with Haloarcula amylolytica BD-3.

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Acetylation is a chemical modification of wood to enhance its properties. IR-spectroscopy is a useful technique for proofing chemical bondings in wood and the At-tenuated Total Reflection (ATR) Infrared Spectroscopy technique was applied as an eas-ier technique over other IR-spectroscopies. In this research, different degrees of acetyla-tion, weight percentage gains (WPGs) in beech and pine mini-stakes were achieved by us-ing acetic anhydride. Acetylated samples were analyzed by applying an Attenuated Total Reflection (ATR) Infrared Spectroscopy technique. Comparison of the acetylated samples with non-acetylated woods showed that hydroxyl groups (O-H) were diminished at wave numbers of about 3,354-3,328 cm-1 due to the substitution of hydrophobic acetyl groups in cell wall polymers. A strong peak appeared at wave numbers of about 1,733-1,728 cm-1 in beech and 1,737-1,728 cm-1 in pine due to the carbonyl (C=O) stretching of acetyl groups. The magnitude of the bands increased with raising the weight percentage gains (WPGs). The methyl deformation of the acetyl groups induced at wave number 1369 cm-1 caused by the stretching of C-H in polysaccharides. There was also a clear increase in the magni-tude of the wave numbers at about 1234-1226 cm-1 in beech and 1236-1226 cm-1 in pine due to the stretching of C-O and carbonyl deformation in the ester bonds during the ace-tylation of lignin.

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Effects of three pressure reduction rates (PRR) of 103 Pa s-1, 197 Pa s-1, and 347 Pa s-1 on temperature distribution and variation, moisture content, and sensory quality of steamed stuffed buns were investigated after vacuum cooling. The distributions and variations of surface temperatures were determined by the thermal infrared imaging method. The temperature profiles presented significant differences in the average cooling rates of the different parts, depending on the PRR. Results showed that the greatest mass loss of 8.1% and the shortest cooling time of 288 seconds were found with the quickest PRR of 347 Pa s-1, while the least mass loss of 5.96% and the longest cooling time of 955 seconds were observed in the case of the slowest PRR of 103 Pa s-1. The pressure reduction rates had little influence on the changes of moisture contents in the crumb and stuffing. The sensory quality scores of vacuum-cooled buns at 103 and 197 Pa s-1 were higher than those at 347 Pa s-1.

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Investigation of quality characteristics of food products during different manufacturing stages such as storage, processing and consumption is important to reduce food loss. In recent years many researches have established for developing rapid and non-destructive techniques for quality control. In this study the potential of visible and near infrared spectroscopy (Vis/NIRS) in determining the quality parameters of lime including total soluble solid and acidity in reflection mode was investigated in the wavelength range of 400 to 1000 nm.­ The effects of different pre-processing techniques and spectral treatments, such as standard normal variable transformation (SNV), multiplicative scatter correction (MSC), median filter, Savitzky & Golay and the derivatives were evaluated. The model was developed based on partial least squares (PLS) regression. The correlation coefficient (R²) and root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) for predictive model of soluble solids content was 0.949, 0.105 °Brix respectively. These parameters of the model predicting acidity was found to be 0.909 and 0.118 respectively. These results showed the high potential of Vis/NIRS and the important role of preprocessing techniques in developing precise models for the prediction of lime internal quality characteristics.

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  Drying is one of the preservation techniques in which moisture removal through simultaneous heat and mass transfer occurs. Due to low energy efficiency and prolonged time of hot air drying, the new drying techniques such as infrared, must be employed. In this study, the effects of temperature and drying method on the kinetics of persimmon slices with 5 mm fixed thickness were investigated. The tests were performed at 3 temperature levels (50, 60 and 70^◦c) using both hot air and infrared dryers in 3 replicates. The experimental data obtained from drying treatments were fitted to 9 mathematical models in order to evaluate the drying kinetics of persimmon slices. The fitting quality of the proposed models was evaluated using the coefficient of determination (R²), root mean squares error (RMSE), chi- square (χ²) and sum square error (SSE). Based on the results, Wang and Singh model was found to be the best model fitted to the experimental hot air drying data at all temperature levels. In the case of experimental infrared drying data at 50 and 60^◦c, the logarithmic model showed the best fitting results while at 70^◦C, 2-term model showed the highest fitting quality. These models exhibited the highest value of R² and the least RMSE, χ² and SSE comparing to the other models

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Short and medium infrared radiation implemented as an energy source in drying process under vacuum conditions. Any comparative study was not carried out between these two energy sources in drying process of agricultural products. In this study, effects of short and medium wave of infrared were evaluated and compared on drying behavior of peach slices under vacuum condition. Drying of the samples was implemented under both the energy sources at the absolute pressures of 20, 40 and 60 kPa and drying temperatures of 50, 60 and 70°C. Drying behavior of peach slices as well as the effect of drying conditions on moisture loss trend, effective diffusion coefficient, color and shrinkage of peach slices, dried in an infrared-vacuum dryer were examined. Effective diffusion coefficient of peach slices under medium wave infrared at different drying conditions was more than short wave infrared in the ranges of 2.6×10^-11 to 1.4×10^-10 m²/s. Total color difference and shrinkage of peach slices under short wave infrared at different drying conditions was less than medium wave infrared in the range of 6.6 to 8.7 and 7.8% to 9.7%, respectively. Minimum total color difference of peach slices under short and medium wave of infrared were obtained 8.2 and 14.8 and minimum shrinkage of peach slices under short and medium wave infrared were achieved 46.7% and 55.9% respectively.  

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In this study, the combination of infrared - hot air dryer was used for drying of button mushroom. The effect of infrared lamp power (150, 250 and 375 W), hot air temperature (50, 60 and 70 °C) and hot air rate (1, 2 and 3 m/s) on drying of button mushroom were investigated. The results of infrared-hot air drying of button mushrooms showed that by increasing of lamp power from 150 to 375, the drying rate increased. With the increase in hot air temperature from 50 to 70 °C, and hot air rate from 1and 3 m/s, weight loss increased 10.3% and 13.9%, respectively. Also process modeling were done with the genetic algorithm–artificial neural network (GA-ANN) method with 4 inputs (lamp power, hot air temperature and rate, drying time) and 1 outputs for prediction of weight loss. Sensitivity analysis results by optimum GA-ANN showed the drying time of mushroom was the most sensitive factor for controlling of weight loss. The results of modeling by GA-ANN showed that a network with 7 neurons in the hidden layer with sigmoid activation function can predicted the weight loss (R=0.99) of button mushrooms dried by infrared system-hot air method.

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In this study, drying kinetic of tomato slice in a combined infrared-vacuum dryer was investigated. The effects of infrared lamp power at three levels (300, 350 and 400 W) and pressure of vacuum oven at three levels (6, 16 and 26 kPa) on drying time and moisture diffusion coefficients during drying process of tomato were evaluated. The results showed that the effects of infrared lamp power and pressure on the drying process of tomato were significant (p<0.05). With increase in infrared lamp power from 300 to 400 W, drying time of tomato 42.86 percent reduced. In addition, decreasing in vacuum oven pressure from 26 to 6 kPa reduced 40.00 percent of drying time. The effects of infrared heat power and vacuum oven pressure on effective diffusivity coefficient of tomato were investigated and the results showed that the effective diffusivity coefficient was increased with increasing heat source power and decreasing of pressure. Moisture effective diffusivity coefficient of tomato was between 5.00×10-10 - 2.38×10-9 m2/s. In fitting of tomato drying process data, the quadratic model, compared to other models, with the highest R2 and the lowest error, had closer results to the experimental data. According to the results obtained in this study, the use of this dryer is recommended for the drying of tomato slice.

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Nowadays, sewage system is either being installed or has been installed in both developing and developed countries. CCTV cameras and the estimation of pipe age are main sources of inspecting sewer pipeline conditions, although not providing decisive information. Managing sewage installations requires reliable quantitative and geometrical data on the conditions of pipes both in-service and after installation. Measuring the rate of sewage blockage has always been challenging. Various attempts have been done to develop and apply different techniques for the determination of pipe blockage since the 1990s, but most of them were not practical or comprehensive. Pipe profiling could be a novel method in this regard. The method proposed in this paper would be able to measure both the cross-section and profile of sewer pipes. This includes two infrared sensors and a servomotor attached to a measurement device mechanism. The set enters a sewer pipe and measures the coordinates of pipe cross-section points. Then, the collected raw data are transferred outside in order to be processed and later saved in a text file format. The saved data will be depicted as pipe cross-section 2D profile using the suggested and developed API package at SOLIDWORKS environment, which in turn will result in the availability of a 3D model of under-inspection pipes. It should be added that different parameters of every desired pipe cross-section will be measurable as well.

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In recent years, infrared radiation (IR) has been considered as one of the suitable methods for drying and decontamination of different spices. However, the low penetration depth of the IR limits its use for food processing in the industry. Due to the importance of Carum carvi as a spice with medical properties, this research aimed to determine the effect of the sample’s structure (powder and seeds), water activity (0.24, 0.56 and 0.89) and the power of IR emitter (222 to 960W) on the penetration depth of the IR into Carum carvi For this propose, the heat fluxes received by copper black body that placed under samples with different thickness was measured. Afterward, the penetration depth was calculated through a mathematical model. The results indicated while aw of the sample, the IR power, and their interaction had a significant effect on the penetration depth of the IR, the structural properties of the sample had no significant effect on it. Increasing the infrared power to 601W enhanced the penetration depth in all of the samples. The highest penetration depth into the powder and the seeds of Carum carvi with aw 0.24 was achieved at the IR power of 601W, and was recorded 4.07±0.27 and 3.85±0.23mm while the samples with aw 0.89 were shown the highest penetration depth when they were irradiated by IR power of 845W) 4.12±0.18 and 4.09±0.13mm). According to the results, determining of IR penetration depth in the spice can be used to determine of their optimal thickness during the infrared food process.

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Protein as an important ingredient in wheat plays main role in the production of wheat’s products. Because of the production of various products from wheat, fast and online measuring of wheat grain quality is very important   to control of flour production process and choosing an appropriate variety. Also in precision farming, combination of quantity and quality maps lets farmers to evaluate and control the plant production, well. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the use of infrared spectroscopy in reflectance mode to predict protein and moisture content of wheat grain. In this study about 108 samples were collected from three varieties   namely Mihan, Gazkojhen and Pishgam in the region near Hamedan province in Iran. Grain proteins content were measured with a DA7200 near infrared spectroscopy apparatus. This spectroscopy collects reflectance over a wavelength range of 650-1650 nm in 5 nm increments. Results show that the best models were obtained using the PLSR method and its preprocessing SG+SNV+D1 and MA+D2+SNV for protein and moisture content, respectively. The correlation coefficient (R²), root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) and Standard Deviation Ratio (SDR) were obtained 0.84, 0.835 and 2.54 for protein content, whereas 0.96, 0.994 and 5.34 for moisture content, respectively. Results showed that there are no significant differences among proteins of three varieties. But the sampling places have a significant effect on the protein content at the significant level of 5%. These results indicated that the infrared spectroscopy method is an efficient method and has a strong potential for rapid detection of protein and moisture content of wheat grains
 

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Drying is one of the ways of storing of persimmon. In this study, to increasing shelf life of persimmon and producing high-quality products, infrared dryer was used and mass transfer kinetics, density, rehydration and color of samples were measured. The results showed that radiation lamp power and distance of lamp from sample had significant effect on the moisture loss kinetics and drying time (P<0.05). With increasing in radiation power, as well as reducing the distance of samples from the source of radiation, drying time decreased. The average density and rehydration for the dried samples in infrared were 639 kg /m³  and 270 %, respectively. The average calculated color changes (ΔE) for the power of 200, 300 and 400 w were 14.43, 10.09 and 20.04, respectively. The results of modeling by genetic algorithm-artificial neural network showed that artificial neural network combined with genetic algorithm provides better results and with combine them the speed of analysis and accuracy of modeling process increases. Using a network with 15 neurons in the hidden layer and using the hyperbolic tangent activation function and percentage data used to training/validation/testing equal 20/20/60 may be predicted drying kinetics of persimmon.
 

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Chicken nugget is one of the most popular convenience food in the world. Because of high-fat content in preparation of nuggets with regular methods that causes obesity and other related diseases, other techniques like pretreatment using gum and drying came into attention. In this study, chicken nuggets coated with batter containing Balangu gum (0.25 and 0.5%) were cooked by infrared-frying method in three heat fluxes of 18.5, 21.6, 24.7 kW/m² for 12 minutes. The effects of the process and gum concentration on moisture content, fat, total weight loss, color parameters (a*, b* and L*) and texture properties of this product were investigated. The sample containing 0.5% gum had the highest moisture content (51.80%) and by increasing the power of the infrared radiation, moisture content decreased. The lowest fat content was related to the sample with a heat flux of 24.7kW/m² containing 0.5% Balangu gum. By decreasing gum concentration and decreasing the power of the infrared radiation, fat content of samples increased. Also, Color attribute L* which shows lightness had the lowest amount in the control sample because of higher heat during the cooking process. The hardness of chicken nugget in various treatments did not change significantly, which can be important in consumer acceptance, but cohesiveness of samples treated using infrared-gum treatment showed significant difference compared to the control sample (P<0.05).

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In the present study, an infrared-assisted solar dryer was used to determine the drying kinetics, energy consumption and quality parameters evaluation of Echium amoenum. Experiments were conducted with two levels of drying air flow rate (0.0025 and 0.005 m³s^-1) and three levels of IR lamp power (100, 150 and 213 W). Drying time, energy consumption and evaluation of quality properties in different air flow rates and lamp powers were compared to the conventional method (shade drying). Five empirical models were fitted on the experimental data and the goodness of regression models were evaluated using coefficient of determination (R²), root mean square error (RMSE), and Chi square (χ²). Results of drying time in the different experiments showed highly significant differences respect to the conventional method (p-value<0.01). Also results showed that increasing the air flow rate and IR power caused a reduction of 37% and 17% in drying time, respectively. Best empirical model to describe the drying behavior was the Page model. The lowest specific energy consumptions (SEC) was 4.63 MJ kg^-1, which was occurred at the air flow rate and IR power of 0.005 m³s^-1 and 150 W and the highest SEC was 5.26 MJ kg^-1 and occurred at 0.0025 m³s^-1 of air flow rate and 213 W of IR lamp, respectively. Finally, the air flow rate of 0.005 m³s^-1 and the IR power of 150 W was recommended for Echium amoenum drying in the IR-ASD because of the fair energy consumption and the suitable product color.
 

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The present study investigates the thermal response of individuals whose forearms were subjected to severe cold stimulation and how it is influenced by the personal and physiological characteristics. So, the hands’ transient thermal responses of 89 individuals (male) was observed by thermography imaging technique. Then, statistical analysis was employed to establish an experimental relationships to estimate the thermal response time of the subjects with different individual and physiological conditions. The results showed that among the 9 individual and physiological parameters (age, vascular fat, muscle percentage, fat percentage, body mass index, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, heart rate and fasting time), only four independent parameters including internal fat, body mass index, systolic blood pressure and fasting time are significant related to the response time. Also, using multivariate linear regression, a relationship was developed to estimate the thermal response time of the subjects against cold stimulation. This relationship indicates that the response time of the obese can be up to 20% higher than that of the lean subjects. In addition, the results shows that for each one hour after the last meal, the thermal response of the body is slower about 1%.

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Water content plays an important role in the process of plant photosynthesis and biomass accumulation. Many methods have been developed to retrieve canopy leaf water content from remote sensing data. However, the validity of these methods has not been verified, which limits their applications. This study estimates the Leaf Water Content (LWC) of winter wheat with three most widely used indexes: Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Simple Ratio (SR), and Shortwave Infrared Perpendicular Water Stress Index (SPSI), as well as MODIS short wave and near infrared data, and then compares remote sensing estimates of vegetation water content with field-measured values measured in concurrent dates. The results indicate that the three indexes are significantly correlated with the LWC of winter wheat at the 0.01 significance level. They all have good accuracy with higher than 90%. The indexes derived from MODIS bands 6 and 2 were better than those from bands 7 and 2 for measuring wheat leaf water content, and the correlations of the former two (NDWI and SR) were stronger than that of SPSI.