Commercial Class Research Articles

Microbiological and Enzymatic Activity Modulates the Bitter Taste Reduction in Decanted Coratina Olive Oil.

Coratina monocultivar extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) is known for its level of bitterness, which, if too high, can cause consumer acceptance problems. The aim of this study was to modulate the bitter taste of freshly produced olive oil through endogenous enzymatic activity and microbiota during the decantation phase. The opalescent appearance of the newly produced EVOO was substantially reduced during the first three months of decantation due to the deposition of more than 90% of suspended material, consisting of vegetation water and suspended solid particles. The high content of biophenols and the reduction in water concentration in the oil samples negatively affected the survival of yeasts, which were absent in the oil samples at the end of the third month of decantation. The oleuropeinolytic activity was very intense during the first month of decantation, whereas the reduction in the bitter taste associated with the aglycons was consistent only in the second and third months of decantation. At the end of decantation, the sensory notes of bitterness in the Coratina EVOO were reduced by 33%, lowering the position on the value scale without altering the other qualitative parameters whose values fell within the limits of the commercial EVOO class.

Chemical and morphological characteristics of common bean seed and evaluating genetic advance in commercial classes.

Common bean (Phaseolus vulagris L.) is a nutritionally important food crop with prospective health benefits in the world. The current study was evaluated the chemical components, morphological characteristics, and genetic advance of 22 common bean cultivars/lines seeds from three commercial classes (white, red, pinto beans) adapted to different climates of Iran. The results showed significant variations among 22 common bean cultivars/lines for all studied seed traits. The commercial group comparisons showed that pinto beans were the best in terms of seed morphological characteristics but red beans were superior for seed protein percentage and zinc content. White beans had high amounts of iron, calcium and magnesium, and also presented high amounts of starch and uronic acid as anti-nutritional factors. Among the chemical components, crude fat had the highest genetic and phenotypic coefficients of variation, whereas starch percentage showed the lowest values. The genetic advance over the mean ranged from 6.73% (starch percentage) to 66.31% (100-seed weight), and high heritability was estimated for calcium content (0.99). AND1007 Line demonstrated the high seed protein, iron and zinc contents. To confirm the results, a genotype-by-trait biplot was done. These results could help to achieve a common bean cultivar with a high amount of nutritional value of seeds and appropriate seed characteristics with a low amount of anti-nutritional factors.

Budget reform of Alexander II and the development of the institute of Budget Law in the second half of the XIX - early XX century

The article analyzes the new rules adopted by the Board of Alexander II for the preparation, review, approval and execution of the state painting (budget) and the approval of the principle of publicity - the publication of the revenue and expenditure parts of the budget. The publicity of the budget ensured the confidence of the commercial and industrial classes and contributed to the economic development of the country.

Computing Marginal Cost of Durability of Energy Systems Components by Structural Optimization With Fatigue Constraints

Abstract There is a relationship between product durability and the effect the product has on the environment and economy. One approach that impacts this dynamic involves a circular economy. The idea of a circular economy is gaining more traction as some businesses have begun to shift toward a product as a service model in which they, the businesses, maintain ownership of the product. One example of this business model is emerging in the energy sector. Given this shift, the life of the product becomes more important as it directly impacts the bottom line of the business. This gives rise to the marginal cost of durability (MCD) metric. The MCD determines the cost of the product in relation to the life of the system. For longer life, the design generally necessitates more cost-intensive measures to ensure durability. In the context of sustainable design, system life is particularly important for renewable energy systems that promote sustainable living. These large structures often require a high volume of materials and the end-of-life disposal for those materials. The design requirements for material also increase as the design life increases. The additional materials provide a safeguard against failure phenomena, such as fatigue. The MCD metric has been used in previous studies. However, there is no formal method for determining the MCD. This article examines a method for measuring the MCD for the commercial class of wind energy production systems. A metamodel of the damage response is built in lieu of expensive computational models. Design optimization is used to search for the design parameters having fatigue damage as a constraint. This process is repeated for a set of system life values, yielding a set of designs. Curve fitting is used to find a mathematical relationship between life and cost. An example of this method is applied to the study of a wind turbine tower life. The study indicates that the wind turbine tower design for 80 years has 34% more mass and cost than a 20-year design. The results from the proposed method provide information that can be used to determine the design life of a system.

Upgrading Behavioral Models for the Design of Digital Predistorters.

This work presents a strategy to upgrade models for power amplifier (PA) behavioral modeling and digital predistortion (DPD). These incomplete structures are the consequence of nonlinear order and memory depth model truncation with the purpose of reducing the demand of the limited computational resources available in standard processors. On the other hand, the alternative use of model structures pruned a priori does not guarantee that every significant term is included. To improve the limited performance of an incomplete model, a general procedure to augment its structure by incorporating significant terms is demonstrated. The sparse nature of the problem allows a successive search incorporating additional terms with higher nonlinear order and memory depth. This approach is investigated in the modeling and linearization of a commercial class AB PA operating at a compression point of about 6 dB, and a class J PA operating near saturation. Results highlight the capabilities of this upgrading procedure in the improvement of linearization capabilities of DPDs.

Sources of Resistance to Common Bacterial Blight and Charcoal Rot Disease for the Production of Mesoamerican Common Beans in the Southern United States.

The gene pool of Mesoamerican common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) includes genotypes in the small-to-medium-size seeded dry beans, as well as some snap beans from hotter environments adapted to the Southeastern United States. However, the warm and humid climate of the Southeastern United States is conducive to diseases such as Common Bacterial Blight (CBB) and Charcoal Rot (CR). The pathogens for these two diseases can survive long periods in infested soil or on seeds and are difficult to control through pesticides. Hence, field-level resistance would be the best management strategy for these diseases. The goals of this study were (1) to evaluate field-level resistance from the various commercial classes and subgroups represented in the Mesoamerican gene pool as sources for breeding beans for the region and (2) to evaluate genome-wide marker × trait associations (GWAS) using genetic markers for the genotypes. A total of 300 genotypes from the Mesoamerican Diversity Panel (MDP) were evaluated for CBB and CR in field experiments for three years. CBB resistance was also tested with a field isolate in controlled greenhouse conditions. The analysis of variance revealed the presence of variability in the MDP for the evaluated traits. We also identified adapted common bean genotypes that could be used directly in Southeastern production or that could be good parents in breeding programs for CBB and CR resistance. The GWAS detected 14 significant Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) markers associated with CBB resistance distributed on five chromosomes, namely Pv02, Pv04, Pv08, Pv10, and Pv11, but no loci for resistance to CR. A total of 89 candidate genes were identified in close vicinity (±100 kb) to the significant CBB markers, some of which could be directly or indirectly involved in plant defense to diseases. These results provide a basis to further understand the complex inheritance of CBB resistance in Mesoamerican common beans and show that this biotic stress is unrelated to CR resistance, which was evident during a drought period. Genotypes with good yield potential for the Southeastern U.S. growing conditions were found with resistant to infection by the two diseases, as well as adaptation to the hot and humid conditions punctuated by droughts found in this region.

A Reduced-Complexity Direct Learning Architecture for Digital Predistortion Through Iterative Pseudoinverse Calculation

In this letter, a novel approach is proposed for digital predistortion (DPD) with direct learning architecture (DLA). Regression of a Volterra behavioral model requires the pseudoinverse of a matrix, which needs many resources due to the inverse operation when the Moore–Penrose pseudoinverse is used. This work substitutes the pseudoinverse calculation by a polynomial expansion (PE) method to obtain a polynomial expansion direct learning architecture (PE-DLA), which attains a pseudoinverse in an iterative fashion avoiding the inverse operation and consequently reducing the algorithm computational complexity. Experimental results show that the number of iterations in the PE-DLA affects the convergence speed. The proposal is benchmarked against other state-of-the-art approaches such as the classic DLA and the covariance matrix DLA (CM-DLA) in the DPD of a commercial class AB power amplifier, concluding that the linearization performance of the current proposal is equivalent to others while featuring simple operations.

Assessment of an electrical coolant pump on a heavy-duty diesel engine

Hybridization of the drive train in commercial vehicles is a key solution toward meeting the strict future requirements to reduce carbon dioxide emissions within the European Union. In order to decrease fleet consumption a large number of different hybrid systems are already available in series in the passenger car sector. Due to the cheap and powerful 48 volt hybrid components and the lower hazard potential compared to high voltage, future commercial vehicles could also benefit from the 48V technology and contribute to lower fleet fuel consumption. Therefore, a complete 48V mild hybrid system was built on the diesel engine test bench as part of a research project. This paper highlights the utilization of a powerful 48V-motor to propel the coolant pump on a diesel engine of the 13-L commercial vehicle class. Three different drive variants of the coolant pump were implemented and measured on the diesel engine test bench. MATLAB®/Simulink®-simulations were conducted to assess the possible fuel savings in three different driving cycles. This paper provides a summary and interpretation of the measurement and simulation results. The simulation studies predict a decrease of fuel consumption of up to 0.94%. Furthermore, the additional advantages of electrified coolant pumps based on 48V are discussed.

Voltage Dependence of the Reference System in Medium- and High-Voltage Current Transformer Calibrations

A sampling current ratio measurement system has been developed to calibrate the voltage dependence of ratio error and phase displacement of current transformers (CTs) used for medium-voltage (MV) and high-voltage (HV) applications. The influence of voltage-induced leakage current on the apparent ratio error and phase displacement of the reference circuit was unambiguously demonstrated using a novel measurement method. Measurement results for voltages up to 24 kV show that the observed leakage current is purely capacitive and caused by the shielded cable capacitance of the HV cable used to feed the current. The maximum ratio error and phase displacement were found to be about 100 parts in 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">6</sup> and 100 μrad for the smallest current of 100 A used for these investigations. Since these values scale linearly with the applied voltage and inversely proportional with current, the assumption of negligible voltage dependence used in other reference systems presented in literature is questionable. Using the corrected reference circuit, a commercial class 0.2S MV CT with 2500-A nominal current was calibrated at voltage levels up to 24 kV. The voltage dependence of ratio error and phase displacement for primary currents up to 500 A was demonstrated to be capacitive as well, with a maximum impact on the current ratio of almost 0.9% for a primary current of 100 A (corresponding to 3.6% at 1% of nominal current). This value is beyond the limits of in-force standards, which emphasizes the necessity of implementing voltage dependence testing in those standards.

Aritmética para o ensino comercial: um estudo a partir de manuais escolares

At the beginning of the 19th century, with the arrival of the Royal family in Brazil, D. Joao VI saw the need to encourage the emergence of an environment conducive to the formation of an elite capable of providing the administrative staff of the new seat of the imperial government and train professionals. To this end, different institutions were created for public administration, such as Banco do Brasil and for education such as military academies, aimed at higher education. In addition to the primary education that worked in “reading, writing and counting” classes and secondary education classes, there were also other classes in Brazil for professional education, such as arts and crafts courses and classes for men who knew how to read, write and calculate, in order to qualify traders in the main commercial plazas in the country. Created in the similarity of the Lisbon class, the Aula de Comercio began to operate in Brazil from 1809 under the jurisdiction of the Junta de Comercio, Agricultura, Fabricas e Navegacao. Commerce classes were created in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Recife. Regarding the contents studied, topics of Mathematics, geography, bookkeeping and political economy were present. The main reference for the teaching of mathematics was Bezout's book Elementos de Arithmetica, used in Portugal and Brazil. However, other books began to be written, especially after the 1846 reform. This paper aims to discuss the contents of Arithmetic present in didactic manuals for the instruction of traders who circulated in Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the 19th century. There are two commercial Arithmetic books that circulated at the time, namely Tratado de Arithmetica Commercial by Paulo Perestrello da Câmara and Arithmetica Elementar Commercial de Joao Guilherme Kottinger by Joao Guilherme Kottinger, published respectively in 1846 and 1847, after the reforms in Aula de Comercio in Rio de Janeiro. The knowledge of the contents proposed in the didactic works highlighted in this work, helped to understand the role of Arithmetic in the scope of training of trade professionals in the early 19th century and the use of this knowledge in the practice of traders. We found that many of the contents exposed in the works of Artithmetic have similarities with the commercial Arithmetics published since the Middle Ages. What is perceived is that the contents of these works are closer to the practical contents necessary for commerce than to teaching from Bezout's book. Examples of these contents are simple and compound interest; discounts and rebates; company and league rules; calculation of annuities and amortization; national and foreign weights and measures; exchange rates among others. The rules presented seek to cover the entire system that involves a negotiation: the organization of the company and how profits and dividends are managed in a company; in which currency the commodity is traded; interest or discounts on products; what are the conditions for trading to yield more profit and less loss; the forms of guarantee for the goods to reach their destination, the price to be charged for transportation, among other aspects. Thus, it is expected that, from the study of school manuals, there will be a greater approximation from the historical point of view about the knowledge of Arithmetic and the school culture present in the Commercial Classes, during the first decades of the 19th century.

Genetic Diversity, Population Structure, and Andean Introgression in Brazilian Common Bean Cultivars after Half a Century of Genetic Breeding.

Brazil is the largest consumer and third highest producer of common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) worldwide. Since the 1980s, the commercial Carioca variety has been the most consumed in Brazil, followed by Black and Special beans. The present study evaluates genetic diversity and population structure of 185 Brazilian common bean cultivars using 2827 high-quality single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). The Andean allelic introgression in the Mesoamerican accessions was investigated, and a Carioca panel was tested using an association mapping approach. The results distinguish the Mesoamerican from the Andean accessions, with a prevalence of Mesoamerican accessions (94.6%). When considering the commercial classes, low levels of genetic differentiation were seen, and the Carioca group showed the lowest genetic diversity. However, gain in gene diversity and allelic richness was seen for the modern Carioca cultivars. A set of 1060 ‘diagnostic SNPs’ that show alternative alleles between the pure Mesoamerican and Andean accessions were identified, which allowed the identification of Andean allelic introgression events and shows that there are putative introgression segments in regions enriched with resistance genes. Finally, genome-wide association studies revealed SNPs significantly associated with flowering time, pod maturation, and growth habit, showing that the Carioca Association Panel represents a powerful tool for crop improvements.

Estimating the technical feasibility of fuel cell and battery electric vehicles for the medium and heavy duty sectors in California

Transitioning the medium and heavy-duty vehicle fleet to electric vehicles (EVs) such as battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) is an important step in supporting greenhouse gas and regional air pollutant emission reduction goals. Travel demand patterns for medium and heavy-duty vehicles, however, have a more diverse and stricter set of requirements compared to light duty vehicles. Therefore, it is critical to understand the technical feasibility of using BEVs and FCEVs to meet the medium and heavy duty vehicle travel demands as a function of vehicle capabilities and infrastructure availability. This work develops and applies a representative dataset of California-based medium and heavy duty vehicles trips to evaluate (1) potential electric load demand of future BEVs and (2) the feasibility of EVs to meet state-wide medium and heavy duty travel demand. From a technical perspective, EVs can support between 62 and 76% of commercial Class 2B-7 vehicle miles traveled with technologies in development today. Further increases will require increasing vehicle range, improving fuel efficiency, and/or expanding available charging locations. Class 8 trucks have a much lower BEV feasibility compared to FCEVs due to their weight and longer trip distances, with 100-mile vehicles meeting up to 8% of vehicle miles travelled with home base charging. Class 8 FCEVs with the same range can meet up to 27% and are likely to have expanded ranges that facilitate up to 68% due to inherent benefits of storing on-board hydrogen relative to batteries. Feasibility results indicate that EVs can significantly contribute to reducing emissions from the medium and heavy duty sectors but cannot fully meet demand under the configurations considered.

Resolving Spectral Mismatch Errors for Perovskite Solar Cells in Commercial Class AAA Solar Simulators.

Resolving Spectral Mismatch Errors for Perovskite Solar Cells in Commercial Class AAA Solar Simulators.

The ‘Spirit of Liberal Reform’: Representation, Slavery and Constitutional Liberty in the Glasgow Advertiser, 1789–1794

The period from 1789 to 1794 in Britain witnessed both an accelerated momentum for reform movements as well as a crisis point for the realisation of their aims, in part through widespread official panic about the domestic appropriation of notions of political liberty associated with the French Revolution. In Scotland, the trajectory for political reform reached back before these crisis years through the movement to make the administration and representation of the nation's expanding cities more transparent and accountable to an ascendant commercial class. The burgh reform movement, like the campaign to abolish the slave trade and the movement for parliamentary reform in the early 1790s, took advantage of periodical print as a principal vehicle for the dissemination of its key legislative aims. The essay examines John Mennons's Glasgow Advertiser (1783–1801) as an important case study for how this Scottish public sphere projected these three temporally and ideologically overlapping reform campaigns during a compressed and concentrated period of political volatility, focusing in particular on the newspaper's attempts ‘to maintain a posture of strict independence in the face of sharply polarizing opinions and official harassment’, as Bob Harris argued. The essay maps the trajectory of these three reform movements in the Advertiser's pages, and details how its column inches during the 1792–4 crisis years reflected a commitment to presenting key issues around parliamentary reform to meet a new demand for constitutional information amongst the west of Scotland's labouring classes, whilst continuing to maintain its pages as a platform for the ideological concerns (and manifest anxieties) of the region's propertied readers. What resulted was a unique Scottish periodical space that reconstructed binary debates on the nature of the British constitution—sometimes in items directly juxtaposed on its pages—emerging from increasingly segregated spatial contexts within the Scottish public sphere.

The Political Economy of Status Competition: Sumptuary Laws in Preindustrial Europe

Sumptuary laws that regulated clothing based on social status were an important part of the political economy of premodern states. We introduce a model that rationalizes the use of sumptuary laws by elites to regulate status competition from below. Our model predicts a non-monotonic effect of income - sumptuary legislation initially increases with income, but then falls as income increases further. The initial rise is more likely for states with less extractive institutions, whose ruling elites face greater status threat from the rising commercial class. We test these predictions using a newly collected dataset of country and city-level sumptuary laws.

Adaptability of brazilian beans cultivars to industrial canning

ABSTRACT: A current alternative for meeting the modern consumer’s beans food demands is the industrial processing. This study evaluated the adaptability of eight Brazilian beans cultivars to industrial canning from commercial class cultivars of Carioca and of Black beans. The grains were processed in an industry sector using metallic cans with a capacity of 420 g, where the samples were conditioned without previous hydration. The cooking and sterilization process took place in a rotating autoclave. Quality parameters were evaluated in the canned beans. As a result, it was verified that, for the Carioca class, the Estilo cultivar differs from the rest of the genetic materials in terms of its low drained weight, which contributes to the increase in the total solids in the sauce, which have low hardness values. Estilo cultivar is not suitable for the type of processing used in this experiment. For the Black class, similar quality characteristics were observed between Esplendor and Uirapuru and between Esteio and Campeiro cultivars, where the latter stands out due to its lower damaged bean indices after processing. Finally, with the information present in this paper we intend to contribute to future researches on this subject and thereby increase the consumption and exportation of beans as processed product.

LignoIndo: image database of Indonesian commercial timber

Macroscopic image database of Indonesian commercial timber “LignoIndo” has been developed to support the development of a computer vision-based wood identification system. A total of 809 wood species were taken their macroscopic images by using digital loupe at two magnifications: 50 times and 200 times. All of these timber species are Indonesian commercial timber listed in LIU (License Information Unit) in November 2016. Cross section images of 186 wood species listed in the Ministry of Forestry Degree No 163/2003 were also collected by using mobile phone camera that was attached with 60x magnify lens, as the basis data to the mobile application of automatic wood identification tool (AIKO). The number of wood species in this database will continue to grow as the number of commercial wood species increases. Besides, the number of replicates of specimens for each species of wood can also continue to be added to accommodate wood variations in the same species, the same species from different trees, and different geographic locations. This paper presents data collection methods and summaries of wood data that have been collected including trade name, botanical name, family, durability classes, strength classes, commercial class classification, conservation status, and recommended utilization.

Technological quality of grain of common bean genotypes of the black commercial class

The technological quality from grains of bean should be evaluated in trials of elite lines to complement the agronomic performance evaluation, ensure the selection and recommendation of new cultivars, and guarantee its greater acceptance by the consumer market. Thus, this study aimed to evaluate the technological quality from selected genotypes of black bean grains. We used 12 elite lines and 4 cultivars from commercial black group constituents of the Value for Cultivation and Use (VCU). The trial was carried out on the Experimental Farm of Federal University of Vicosa-MG, in Coimbra County, in the 2012 crops of autumn/winter seasons. The experimental design was in randomized block, with three replications. The evaluated characteristics were shape, degree of flattening, thousand grains weight, hard-to-cook grains percentage, cooking time, husk percentage and the hydration capacity of the grains. The lines VP 24, VP 25 and VP 29 present the medium level of resistance to cooking similar to the cultivars (controls), and the other evaluated lines have normal resistance to bean cooking. The genotypes CNFP 11977, VP 29 and ‘Ouro Negro’ attain, in shorter time, 50% of the maximum hydration capacity of the grains, and resistance between normal and medium for cooking time. The lines VP 29 and CNFP 11977 also obtained the greatest hydration capacity for most evaluated times. The lines VP 26, VP 29, CNFP 11992, VP 27, VP 28, and CNFP 11977 present the best characteristics associated with technological quality of grains.

Comparative Analysis of Greedy Pursuits for the Order Reduction of Wideband Digital Predistorters

This paper provides a review of greedy pursuits for optimizing Volterra-based behavioral models structure and estimating its parameters. An experimental comparison of the digital predistortion (DPD) linearization performance achieved by these approaches for model-order reduction, such as compressive sampling matching pursuit (CoSaMP), subspace pursuit (SP), orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), and the novel doubly OMP (DOMP), is presented. A benchmark of the techniques in the DPD of a commercial class AB power amplifier (PA) and a class J PA operating over a 15-MHz Long-Term Evolution (LTE) signal is presented, giving a clear overview of their pruning characteristics in terms of linearization indicators and regressor selection capabilities. In addition, the benchmark is run in a cross-validation scheme by identifying the DPD with a 30-MHz 5G-new radio (NR) signal and validating with the same signal and a 20-MHz multicarrier wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) signal. The DOMP is shown to be a promising technique since it achieves an enhanced model-order reduction for a similar linearization performance and precision.

Changes in design driving load cases: Operating an upwind turbine with a downwind rotor configuration

AbstractThis work considers the design driving load cases from a full design load basis analysis on an upwind turbine changed into a downwind configuration. The upwind turbine is a commercial class IIIA 2.1‐MW turbine, manufactured by Suzlon. The downwind turbine shows an increase in the normalized tower clearance by 6%, compared with the upwind concept. Removing the blade prebend increases the normalized minimum tower clearance by 17% in the downwind configuration compared with the upwind configuration. The extreme loads on the longitudinal tower bottom bending moment are seen to generally increase by 17% because of the overhanging gravity moment of the rotor‐nacelle assembly. The extreme blade root bending moments are reduced by 10% flapwise, because of the coning of the rotor in downwind direction. The fatigue loads suffer from the tower shadow, leading to an overall increase of the fatigue loads in the blades with up to 5% in flapwise direction in the downwind configuration. Because of blade deflection and coning direction, the downwind configuration shows a 0.75% lower annual energy production. Removing the prebend increases the annual energy production loss to 1.66%.