Automation of Capacitor Discharge Welding (CDW) has not been investigated in
industry due to the limited understanding of the process. The US Department of Energy's Albany Research Center (ALRC) has done an extensive study of the process and reported applications of welds in the manufacture of electro-mechanical products such as...
The use of edible coatings in combination with antimicrobial
agents enhances the microbial stability of foods. In this study we
evaluated the potassium sorbate and sorbic acid permeability of an
edible methylcellulose (MC) - palmitic acid (PA) film with a MC:PA
ratio of 3:1.
Permeability cell measurements were used to...
Chitosan has been proposed as a "natural" coagulating agent to solve wastewater problems. The main hindrance in this commercial chitosan application has been its low cost effectiveness. The hypothesis in our research is that chitosan complexes with natural polyanions is more effective than chitosan alone, particularly in recovering low concentration...
Edible coatings controlling preservative migration from
surface to food bulk could inhibit surface microbial growth
which is often the main cause of spoilage for many food
products. In this project we focused our attention upon
methylcellulose, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, and chitosan as
the structural component for such edible films. These films...
Soluble surimi wash water (SWW) proteins could be recovered using chitosan (Chi) complexed with alginate (Chi-Alg) generating co-products for feed formulations. Chi with a degree of deacetylation (DD) of 84% complexed with Alg at a mixing ratio (MR) of 0.2 was used to study Chi-Alg concentration and treatment time protein...
Quantitative procedures were developed to determine the effect of variability in the model parameters required for the estimation of microbial shelflife and thermal processing time. Monte Carlo simulations combined with these predictive models were implemented in Microsoft Excel™. In the first study,
predictive models were used for shelf-life predictions based...
About 48 million cases of Foodborne illnesses (FBIs) are estimated to occur every year in the US. These are diseases caused by contamination of foods with bacteria, viruses, protozoa, parasites and toxic chemicals. Clostridium difficile infections (CDIs) are an important health-care and community associated problem. Since C. difficile spores have...
The validation and potential use of mathematical models to estimate the
shelf-life of refrigerated food exposed to temperature abuse and basing such
estimations on microbial growth was analyzed. Combined heat transfer, microbial
growth models, and non-parametric statistical procedures formed a computer-based
predictive tool to assess shelf-life and estimate the accuracy...
Equipment and procedures for the rapid measurement of the water vapor
permeability of polymer films and food coatings has been evaluated. The
method uses an electronic sensor to measure the concentration increase in
water vapor diffusing through a film into a chamber of known volume. Air of
known humidity is...