Query: raw material preparers

title: Cellulose: fascinating biopolymer and sustainable raw material.
abstract: As the most important skeletal component in plants, the polysaccharide cellulose is an almost inexhaustible polymeric raw material with fascinating structure and properties. Formed by the repeated connection of D glucose building blocks, the highly functionalized, linear stiff chain homopolymer is characterized by its hydrophilicity, chirality, biodegradability, broad chemical modifying capacity, and its formation of versatile semicrystalline fiber morphologies. In view of the considerable increase in interdisciplinary cellulose research and product development over the past decade worldwide, this paper assembles the current knowledge in the structure and chemistry of cellulose, and in the development of innovative cellulose esters and ethers for coatings, films, membranes, building materials, drilling techniques, pharmaceuticals, and foodstuffs. New frontiers, including environmentally friendly cellulose fiber technologies, bacterial cellulose biomaterials, and in vitro syntheses of cellulose are highlighted together with future aims, strategies, and perspectives of cellulose research and its applications.

title: Castor oil: a vital industrial raw material.
abstract: Even though castor oil is inedible, it has long been an article of commerce. This is, in large measure, due to the versatility of the oil. This article discusses the extraction of castor oil and its refining methods and reviews the industrial applications of the oil. Since castor oil is not edible, it could be substituted in many industrial application areas where edible oils are used. An awareness of the various uses of the oil can be used to make a strong case for an increase in its production as a vital raw material for the chemical industries.

title: Influence of fatty acid composition of raw materials on biodiesel properties.
abstract: The aim of this work was the study of the influence of the raw material composition on biodiesel quality, using a transesterification reaction. Thus, ten refined vegetable oils were transesterificated using potassium methoxide as catalyst and standard reaction conditions (reaction time, 1h; weight of catalyst, 1 wt. of initial oil weight; molar ratio methanol/oil, 6/1; reaction temperature, 60 degrees C) Biodiesel quality was tested according to the standard [UNE EN 14214, 2003. Automotive fuels. Fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) for diesel engines. Requirements and test methods] Some critical parameters like oxidation stability, cetane number, iodine value and cold filter plugging point were correlated with the methyl ester composition of each biodiesel, according to two parameters: degree of unsaturation and long chain saturated factor. Finally, a triangular graph based on the composition in monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and saturated methyl esters was built in order to predict the critical parameters of European standard for whatever biodiesel, known its composition.

title: Asian noodles: History, classification, raw materials, and processing
abstract: Noodles in various contents, formulations, and shapes have been the staple foods for many Asian countries since ancient time. They can be made from wheat, rice, buckwheat, and starches derived from potato, sweet potato, and pulses. Noodles based on wheat are prepared mainly from three basic ingredients; flour, water, and salt. There exist two distinct types of wheat flour noodles based on the presence and absence of alkaline salts, regular salted noodles, and alkaline noodles. The basic process of dough mixing, sheet forming, compounding, sheeting/reduction, and cutting are essentially constant for all machine made noodles. Noodle strands coming out of cutting rolls can be further processed to produce different types of noodles. This article analyzed all the major processes involved from raw material to finished products in relation to noodle processing properties and cooked noodle texture. Different ingredients and their functionality in noodle processing were discussed as well. Guidelines were provided to select the right ingredients to produce high quality noodle products. Processing properties, appearance, and colour of noodles are the three key criteria used to judge a process and raw material quality. High quality noodles should be bright in colour with very slow discoloration, have an adequate shelf life without visible microbiological deterioration or oxidative rancidity, and have appropriate flavour and textural characteristics which will vary according to the noodle type and region. Flour plays a key role in all aspects of noodle quality. Protein content is positively correlated with noodle firmness and sometimes negatively correlated with elasticity. Therefore, a correct range of protein content is important for textural characteristics. Adequate gluten strength and extensibility is required in all noodle flours. Noodle dough must be strong enough to withstand sheeting, but not so strong as to cause tearing or difficulty in sheet reduction. A good level of dough extensibility ensures that dough sheets do not shrink back during successive roll passes. The importance of the pasting properties of starch to the texture of cooked noodles has been well documented. The required soft, smooth, and elastic textural properties of certain types of white salted noodles can be best obtained from wheats with high starch paste viscosity and high swelling starch properties. Alkaline noodles do not have the same requirement for high starch swelling properties. Noodles made from flour with high swelling starches have softer texture than those with low swelling starch. Noodles should be bright and slow in discoloration with time after manufacturing. For white salted noodles, a white or creamy white colour is desirable. The level of natural yellow pigment levels (xanthophylls) in flour is highly correlated with noodle colour, and this is wheat variety dependent. For yellow alkaline noodles, a bright yellow colour is required, although the preference for the degree of colour development is regionally based. Noodle darkening increases with the increases of flour extraction rate. This is due to the action of polyphenol oxidase (PPO) enzymes which are largely located in the bran layer. Low flour extraction and ash levels are preferred for the manufacture of noodles with a clean and bright appearance. A relatively fine flour particle size enables even hydration during mixing and optimum, uniform gluten development during sheeting. Increased starch damage, however, is associated with poor noodle colour and undesirable high cooking loss and excessive surface swelling.

title: Bananas, raw materials for making processed food products
abstract: Musa spp. comprising banana and plantain, are among the world's leading fruit crops. Worldwide, 103 million tonnes were produced in 2004, according to FAO statistics database. Few bananas produced undergo industrial processing. Plantain and unripe banana are consumed cooked, whereas, mature dessert banana is eaten raw. Characterising bananas, their processed products and processed consumption forms, is a key precondition for objective communication on these foodstuffs. This will enable niche markets for this major crop, undifferentiated product flows of which are in competition on the worldwide market, to be structured on an objective qualitative basis.

title: WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio
abstract: This paper introduces WaveNet, a deep neural network for generating raw audio waveforms. The model is fully probabilistic and autoregressive, with the predictive distribution for each audio sample conditioned on all previous ones; nonetheless we show that it can be efficiently trained on data with tens of thousands of samples per second of audio. When applied to text to speech, it yields state of the art performance, with human listeners rating it as significantly more natural sounding than the best parametric and concatenative systems for both English and Mandarin. A single WaveNet can capture the characteristics of many different speakers with equal fidelity, and can switch between them by conditioning on the speaker identity. When trained to model music, we find that it generates novel and often highly realistic musical fragments. We also show that it can be employed as a discriminative model, returning promising results for phoneme recognition.

title: Preparing the Raw Material
abstract: Any construction project begins with raw material, and as Confucius suggests, the nature of the raw material is critical to success so much so that you shouldn't even begin if the "wood" is poor. Even if you have sharp, finely honed tools, your project will still fail if the raw material isn't sound. And what, might you ask, is the raw material of software development? Us. People. We are the only raw material of consequence in software development. Oh sure, the process will involve a few keyboards and mice, some compilers, database products, and myriad office supplies, but they're all completely secondary. Contrary to popular myth, we don't write software on computers. We don't write software in programming languages, integrated development environments or case tools, whiteboards, or 3/spl times/5 cards. We write software in our heads.

title: Image super resolution as sparse representation of raw image patches
abstract: This paper addresses the problem of generating a super resolution (SR) image from a single low resolution input image. We approach this problem from the perspective of compressed sensing. The low resolution image is viewed as downsampled version of a high resolution image, whose patches are assumed to have a sparse representation with respect to an over complete dictionary of prototype signal atoms. The principle of compressed sensing ensures that under mild conditions, the sparse representation can be correctly recovered from the downsampled signal. We will demonstrate the effectiveness of sparsity as a prior for regularizing the otherwise ill posed super resolution problem. We further show that a small set of randomly chosen raw patches from training images of similar statistical nature to the input image generally serve as a good dictionary, in the sense that the computed representation is sparse and the recovered high resolution image is competitive or even superior in quality to images produced by other SR methods.

title: Oils and fats as renewable raw materials in chemistry.
abstract: Oils and fats of vegetable and animal origin have been the most important renewable feedstock of the chemical industry in the past and in the present. A tremendous geographical and feedstock shift of oleochemical production has taken place from North America and Europe to southeast Asia and from tallow to palm oil. It will be important to introduce and to cultivate more and new oil plants containing fatty acids with interesting and desired properties for chemical utilization while simultaneously increasing the agricultural biodiversity. The problem of the industrial utilization of food plant oils has become more urgent with the development of the global biodiesel production. The remarkable advances made during the last decade in organic synthesis, catalysis, and biotechnology using plant oils and the basic oleochemicals derived from them will be reported, including, for example, o functionalization of fatty acids containing internal double bonds, application of the olefin metathesis reaction, and de novo synthesis of fatty acids from abundantly available renewable carbon sources.

title: Preparing Instructional Objectives
abstract: Offers a programme on how to identify, select and write specific objectives to be achieved by instruction and provides guided practise for the lecturer or course designer through exercises and case studies.