Search results for "Engineering sciences"
showing 10 items of 2347 documents
Comparison of the greenhouse gas emissions of a high-rise residential building assessed with different national LCA approaches– IEA EBC Annex 72
2020
Introduction: The international research project IEA EBC Annex 72 investigates the life cycle related environmental impacts caused by buildings. The project aims inter alia to harmonise LCA approaches on buildings. Methods: To identify major commonalities and discrepancies among national LCA approaches, reference buildings were defined to present and compare the national approaches. A residential high-rise building located in Tianjin, China, was selected as one of the reference buildings. The main construction elements are reinforced concrete shear walls, beams and floor slabs. The building has an energy reference area of 4566 m2 and an operational heating energy demand of 250 MJ/m2a. An ex…
Ultrasound-assisted green solvent extraction of high-added value compounds from microalgae Nannochloropsis spp.
2015
Abstract The aim of this work was to investigate ultrasound (US)-assisted green solvent extraction of valuable compounds from the microalgae Nannochloropsis spp. Individual green solvents (water, ethanol (EtOH), dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO)) and binary mixture of solvents (water-DMSO and water-EtOH) were used for the extraction procedures. Maximum total phenolic compounds yield ( Y p ≈ 0.33) was obtained after US pre-treatment ( W = 400 W, 15 min), being almost 5-folds higher compared to that found for the untreated samples and aqueous extraction ( Y p ≈ 0.06). The highest yield of total chlorophylls ( Y c ≈ 0.043) was obtained after US ( W = 400 W, 7.5 min), being more than 9-folds highe…
Analysis of eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acid geometrical isomers formed during fish oil deodorization.
2006
International audience; Addition of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFAs) from marine oil into food products implies preliminary refining procedures of the oil which thermal process affects the integrity of LC-PUFAs. Deodorization, the major step involving high temperatures, is a common process used for the refining of edible fats and oils. The present study evaluates the effect of deodorization temperature on the formation of LC-PUFA geometrical isomers. Chemically isomerized eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) were used as reference samples. Fish oil samples have been deodorized at 180, 220 and 250 °C for 3 h and pure EPA and DHA fatty acid methyl esters…
Properties of spray-dried food flavours microencapsulated with two-layered membranes: Roles of interfacial interactions and water
2012
International audience; Engineering the interface of oil-in-water emulsion droplets with biopolymers that modify its permeability could provide a novel technique to improve flavour retention in dry powders. The objective of this study was to determine if volatile compounds were more retained in dry emulsions stabilized by pea protein isolate (PPI)/pectin complex than that stabilized by PPI alone. The retention of ethyl esters during spray-drying increased with decreasing volatility of the encapsulated compound and ranged from 28% to 40%. The addition of pectin to feed emulsions was quite effective in markedly improving the retention of the three studied flavour compounds. In our previous wo…
Coherence resonance in Bonhoeffer-Van der Pol circuit
2009
International audience; A nonlinear electronic circuit simulating the neuronal activity in a noisy environment is proposed. This electronic circuit is exactly ruled by the set of Bonhoeffer-Van Der Pol equations and is excited with a Gaussian noise. Without external deterministic stimuli, it is shown that the circuit exhibits the so-called 'coherence resonance' phenomenon.
Forever Young: Structural Stability of Telomeric Guanine Quadruplexes in the Presence of Oxidative DNA Lesions**
2021
International audience; Human telomeric DNA, in G-quadruplex (G4) conformation, is characterized by a remarkable structural stability that confers it the capacity to resist to oxidative stress producing one or even clustered 8-oxoguanine (8oxoG) lesions. We present a combined experimental/computational investigation, by using circular dichroism in aqueous solutions, cellular immunofluorescence assays and molecular dynamics simulations, that identifies the crucial role of the stability of G4s to oxidative lesions, related also to their biological role as inhibitors of telomerase, an enzyme overexpressed in most cancers associated to oxidative stress.
Comparison of Metrics for the Classification of Soils Under Variable Geometrical Conditions Using Hyperspectral Data
2008
International audience; The objective of this letter is to find a distance metric between reflectance spectra that is not sensitive to the variations on the soil reflectance induced by the geometry of solar-view angles. This is motivated by the fact that differences between spectra measured for the same soil under different observation and illumination configurations can lead to misclassifications. Using 26 soils of different compositions simulated with Hapke’s model and 92 soils of different compositions measured under 28 solarview angle geometries in laboratory conditions, we tested three metrics, namely, root-mean-square error, spectral angle mapper, and R2 (the coefficient of determinat…
Active spike transmission in the neuron model with a winding threshold manifold
2012
International audience; We analyze spiking responses of excitable neuron model with a winding threshold manifold on a pulse stimulation. The model is stimulated with external pulse stimuli and can generate nonlinear integrate-and-fire and resonant responses typical for excitable neuronal cells (all-or-none). In addition we show that for certain parameter range there is a possibility to trigger a spiking sequence with a finite number of spikes (a spiking message) in the response on a short stimulus pulse. So active transformation of N incoming pulses to M (with M>N) outgoing spikes is possible. At the level of single neuron computations such property can provide an active "spike source" comp…
A nonlinear electronic circuit mimicking the neuronal activity in presence of noise
2013
We propose a nonlinear electronic circuit simulating the neuronal activity in a noisy environment. This electronic circuit is ruled by the set of Bonhaeffer-Van der Pol equations and is excited with a white gaussian noise, that is without external deterministic stimuli. Under these conditions, our circuits reveals the Coherence Resonance signature, that is an optimum of regularity in the system response for a given noise intensity.
Improving color correction across camera and illumination changes by contextual sample selection
2012
International audience; In many tasks of machine vision applications, it is important that recorded colors remain constant, in the real world scene, even under changes of the illuminants and the cameras. Contrary to the human vision system, a machine vision system exhibits inadequate adaptability to the variation of lighting conditions. Automatic white bal- ance control available in commercial cameras is not sufficient to pro- vide reproducible color classification. We address this problem of color constancy on a large image database acquired with varying digi- tal cameras and lighting conditions. A device-independent color repre- sentation may be obtained by applying a chromatic adaptation…