A new engineering method for understanding extrusion cooking process

A new engineering method is proposed to understand extrudate expansion and extrusion operation parameters for starch based food extrusion cooking process through dimensional analysis principle, i.e. Buckingham pi theorem. Three dimensionless groups, i.e. pump efficiency, water content and temperature, are suggested to describe the extrudate expansion. Using the three dimensionless groups, an equation is derived to express the extrudate expansion. The model has been used to correlate the experimental data for whole wheat flour and fish feed extrusion cooking. The average deviations of the correlation are respectively 5.9% and 9% for the whole wheat flour and the fish feed extrusion. An alternative 4-coefficient equation is also suggested from the 3 dimensionless groups. The average deviations of the alternative equation are respectively 5.8% and 2.5% in correlation with the same set of experimental data

Expansion of the whole wheat flour extrusion

A new model framework is proposed to describe the expansion of extrudates with extruder operating conditions based on dimensional analysis principle. The Buckingham pi dimensional analysis method is applied to form the basic structure of the model from extrusion process operational parameters. Using the Central Composite Design (CCD) method, whole wheat flour was processed in a twin-screw extruder with 16 trials. The proposed model can well correlate the expansion of the 16 trials using 3 regression parameters. The average deviation of the correlation is 5.9%

Modelling extrudate expansion in a twin-screw food extrusion cooking process through dimensional analysis methodology

A new phenomenological modelling framework is proposed to correlate the extrudate expansion and extrusion process parameters through dimensional analysis methodology. As dimensional analysis is independent of system or equipment structure, the proposed equation may provide a general expression for the extrudate expansion behaviours and process operation conditions. This work includes extrusion cooking trials, model development and data analysis

DIFFERENCE IN RETAIL AND FOODSERVICE SEAFOOD BUYERS IMPRESSION OF AQUACULTURAL PRODUCT

Consumer/Household Economics,

NormFace: L2 Hypersphere Embedding for Face Verification

Thanks to the recent developments of Convolutional Neural Networks, the performance of face verification methods has increased rapidly. In a typical face verification method, feature normalization is a critical step for boosting performance. This motivates us to introduce and study the effect of normalization during training. But we find this is non-trivial, despite normalization being differentiable. We identify and study four issues related to normalization through mathematical analysis, which yields understanding and helps with parameter settings. Based on this analysis we propose two strategies for training using normalized features. The first is a modification of softmax loss, which optimizes cosine similarity instead of inner-product. The second is a reformulation of metric learning by introducing an agent vector for each class. We show that both strategies, and small variants, consistently improve performance by between 0.2% to 0.4% on the LFW dataset based on two models. This is significant because the performance of the two models on LFW dataset is close to saturation at over 98%. Codes and models are released on https://github.com/happynear/NormFaceComment: camera-ready versio

Density shock waves in confined microswimmers

Motile and driven particles confined in microfluidic channels exhibit interesting emergent behavior from propagating density bands to density shock waves. A deeper understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for these emergent structures is relevant to a number of physical and biomedical applications. Here, we study the formation of density shock waves in the context of an idealized model of microswimmers confined in a narrow channel and subject to a uniform external flow. Interestingly, these density shock waves exhibit a transition from `subsonic' with compression at the back to `supersonic' with compression at the front of the population as the intensity of the external flow increases. This behavior is the result of a non-trivial interplay between hydrodynamic interactions and geometric confinement, and is confirmed by a novel quasilinear wave model that properly captures the dependence of the shock formation on the external flow. These findings can be used to guide the development of novel mechanisms for controlling the emergent density distribution and average population speed, with potentially profound implications on various processes in industry and biotechnology such as the transport and sorting of cells in flow channels

A general extrudate bulk density model for both twin-screw and single-screw extruder extrusion cooking processes

Effects of extrusion parameters and raw materials on extrudate expansion are respectively investigated in a twin-screw extruder and a single-screw extruder extrusion cooking experiments for fish feed, wheat, and oat & wheat mixture processing. A new phenomenological model is proposed to correlated extrudate bulk density, extrusion parameters and raw material changes based on the experimental results. The average absolute deviation (AAD) of the correlation is 2.2% for fish feed extrusion in the twin-screw extrusion process. For the single-screw extrusion process, the correlation AAD is respectively 3.03%, 5.14% for wheat and oat & wheat mixture extrusion; and the correlation AAD is 6.6% for raw material change effects. The correlation results demonstrate that the proposed equation can be used to calculate extrudate bulk density for both the twin-screw extruder and the single-screw extruder extrusion cooking processes

Selective rendering for efficient ray traced stereoscopic images

Depth-related visual effects are a key feature of many virtual environments. In stereo-based systems, the depth effect can be produced by delivering frames of disparate image pairs, while in monocular environments, the viewer has to extract this depth information from a single image by examining details such as perspective and shadows. This paper investigates via a number of psychophysical experiments, whether we can reduce computational effort and still achieve perceptually high-quality rendering for stereo imagery. We examined selectively rendering the image pairs by exploiting the fusing capability and depth perception underlying human stereo vision. In ray-tracing-based global illumination systems, a higher image resolution introduces more computation to the rendering process since many more rays need to be traced. We first investigated whether we could utilise the human binocular fusing ability and significantly reduce the resolution of one of the image pairs and yet retain a high perceptual quality under stereo viewing condition. Secondly, we evaluated subjects' performance on a specific visual task that required accurate depth perception. We found that subjects required far fewer rendered depth cues in the stereo viewing environment to perform the task well. Avoiding rendering these detailed cues saved significant computational time. In fact it was possible to achieve a better task performance in the stereo viewing condition at a combined rendering time for the image pairs less than that required for the single monocular image. The outcome of this study suggests that we can produce more efficient stereo images for depth-related visual tasks by selective rendering and exploiting inherent features of human stereo vision

The covering radius problem for sets of perfect matchings

Consider the family of all perfect matchings of the complete graph $K_{2n}$ with $2n$ vertices. Given any collection $\mathcal M$ of perfect matchings of size $s$, there exists a maximum number $f(n,x)$ such that if $s\leq f(n,x)$, then there exists a perfect matching that agrees with each perfect matching in $\mathcal M$ in at most $x-1$ edges. We use probabilistic arguments to give several lower bounds for $f(n,x)$. We also apply the Lov\'asz local lemma to find a function $g(n,x)$ such that if each edge appears at most $g(n, x)$ times then there exists a perfect matching that agrees with each perfect matching in $\mathcal M$ in at most $x-1$ edges. This is an analogue of an extremal result vis-\'a-vis the covering radius of sets of permutations, which was studied by Cameron and Wanless (cf. \cite{cameron}), and Keevash and Ku (cf. \cite{ku}). We also conclude with a conjecture of a more general problem in hypergraph matchings.Comment: 10 page