Energetic Analysis of Rice Processing Plant: A Case Study of Hisar District in Haryana

A study was conducted to find out electrical and manual energy use pattern in post harvest rice processing operation in modern rice Plant at Hisar district of Haryana. Planting capacity of rice Plant is 200 tons per day and Plant operated 20 hours in one day. The processing operation adopted in modern rice Plant viz, parboiling, drying, polishing & dehusking, sorting & grading and packaging. In processing of rice, modern rice Plant utilized total electrical and manual energy were 64965.5 and 987.84 MJ/day. It was found that the electrical energy consumption of Plant in parboiling 10010.88, drying 16663.80, polishing & dehusking 22936.32, sorting & grading 14445.09 and packaging 1054.18 MJ/day were required. Operation wise manual energy used during the parboiling & drying 235.2, polishing & dehusking 188.16, sorting & grading 94.08 and packaging 470.40 MJ/day.

Exploratory study to determine if risk factors for occupational skin disease vary by type of food processing operation

BACKGROUND: Occupational skin disease (OSD) is a common health issue in the food processing sector. However, risk factors for OSD are suspected to differ according to the nature of the operation. OBJECTIVE: To ascertain if the risk factors for OSD vary depending on the type of food processing operation, namely meat processing vs. a commercial bakery. METHODS: Participants were asked to answer questions regarding workplace exposures and the current skin condition of their hands. Bivariate analyses were conducted to identify differences between the two participating operations. RESULTS: The meat processing workers were more likely to have wet work exposure, used hand sanitizer more often and changed their gloves more frequently. These findings from meat processing represented a statistically significant difference compared to the commercial bakery workers. Also, workers from meat processing reported more severe skin symptoms. CONCLUSIONS: Risk factors for OSD apparently differ between types of food processing operations. Differences in the nature of skin symptoms were also found between the two participating operations. It is therefore suggested that future studies examining OSD within the food processing sector should evaluate this health effect based on the nature of operations rather than the sector as a whole.

Addressing Mode and Bit Extensions to the Thumb-2 Instruction Set Architecture

Thumb-2 is the most recent instruction set architecture for ARM processors which are one of the most widely used embedded processors. In this paper, two extensions are proposed to improve the performance of the Thumb-2 instruction set architecture, which are addressing mode extensions and sign/zero extensions combined with data processing instructions. To speed up access to an element of an aggregated data, the proposed approach first introduces three new addressing modes for load and store instructions. They are register-plus-immediate offset addressing mode, negative register offset addressing mode, and post-increment register offset addressing mode. Register-plus-immediate offset addressing mode permits two offsets and negative register offset allows offset to be a negative value of a register content. Post-increment register offset mode automatically modifies the offset address after the memory operation. The second is the sign/zero extension combined with a data processing instruction which allows the result of a data processing operation to be sign/zero extended to accelerate a type conversion. Several least frequently used instructions are reduced to provide the encoding space for the new extensions. Experiments show that the proposed approach improves performance by an average of 8.6% when compared to the Thumb-2 instruction set architecture.

Technological increase of cutting-out punch life with laser alloying

There are considered engineering methods for cutting-out punch life increase on the basis of laser processing operation surfaces, and also their laser alloying with different materials. The results of experimental investigations are shown which reveal potentialities of the methods under consideration from the point of view of dynamic surface strength and deformation durability increase. Practical recommendations on the introduction of the results obtained are given.

Testing the GDPR in Relation to Biobanking

This chapter looks at when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies, rationae materiae, to biobanking—only when the law applies to biobanking can it be expected to provide any protection for genetic privacy rights in biobanking at all. The GDPR's applicability criteria are outlined in Article 2; criteria concern both the types of processing activity covered by the GDPR and the mechanics of processing covered by the GDPR. In relation to the mechanics of biobank processing, the situation is complex. The key question which emerges is which types of biobanking substances can qualify as personal data? The concept of personal data can be usefully broken down into two aspects of any processing operation. First, the substance being processed: to qualify as personal data, a substance must be able to fulfil three criteria. A substance must be ‘information’, it must ‘relate to’ a specific person, and that person must be a ‘natural person’. In the biobanking context, health, lifestyle, and biographical information, sequenced genomic data, and individual research results certainly fulfil these criteria. Second, the link between the substance and a specific individual: to qualify as personal data, a substance must relate to an individual who is ‘identified or identifiable’. All biobanking substances processed in either linked or pseudonymised form will certainly qualify as ‘identified or identifiable’.

Ship Accident Prediction Based on Improved Quantum-Behaved PSO-LSSVM

Water transportation plays an important role in the comprehensive transportation system and regional logistics. The number of vessel accidents is an important indicator for evaluating vessel traffic safety and the efficiency of the maritime management strategy. The aim of this work is to provide an efficient way to predict the number of vessel accidents in China. Firstly, to weaken the randomness of the vessel accident number time series, the gray processing operation is adopted to generate a new sequence with exponential and approximate exponential rules. In addition, an extended least-squares support vector machine (LSSVM) model is applied in the forecasting of the new sequence, in which the parameters of the LSSVM are optimized by an improved quantum-behaved particle swarm (IQPSO). The proposed method is applied in the forecasting of the number of vessel accidents in China, and the efficiency is shown by comparing the prediction results with GM (1, 1), PSO-LSSVM, and QPSO-LSSVM.

Filtration of stored thick juice for the syrup campaign

Extraction of sucrose from sugarbeet for sugar production on an industrial scale can be divided into two distinct types of operations: beet processing (operation of the entire factory) and syrup processing (operation of the sugar house only). During the beet harvesting campaign thick juice is stored in large tanks for subsequent processing in the syrup campaign. It is good practice to filter the thick juice prior to storage for removal of microbes and insolubles. More importantly is filtration of the thick juice during the thick juice campaign for food safety and to remove any solids that have precipitated during storage for sugar quality. This is normally done using a filter aid to ensure filtration to below 5 µm is achieved. The use of a filter aid is not ideal due to health concerns and the risk of causing sugar quality issues if filter aid is carried forward with the syrup. A filtration system designed to operate without the use of a filter aid was therefore trialed at one of the Tereos factories in France. Standard liquor from storage tanks were filtered through 14–25 µm filter material during the 2018 thick juice campaign. Operational and sugar quality results are discussed.