Source Based Characterization and Pollution Profile of a Baker's Yeast Industry

Baker's yeast industry has significant effects on environment due to significant water consumption and high strength wastewater production. Effluents from baker's yeast industry are characterized by high concentrations of biological oxygen demand (BOD₅), chemical oxygen demand (COD), total Kjeldahl nitrogen (TKN), total dissolved solids (TDS), sulfate, and dark brown color. The aim of this study is to provide a detailed quantitative and qualitative identification and characterization of the wastewater sources from different processes of a baker's yeast industry. It is identified that the most polluted wastewater components of the facility are coming from rotary drum filter and evaporation process. However, the highest pollution loads is identified as tank and equipment cleaning effluent due to very high flow rate from this source. The efforts should be on the way to minimize the water usage for the tank and equipment cleaning process, and to recycle less polluted waste streams back to the process.     

Long-Term Photometry of RT Lacertae: 1. Light and Colour Variation

The peculiar chromospherically active binary system RT Lac was observed in B and V bands between 1989 and 1992. The four-year photoelectric B and V light curves are presented. The light and colour variations in the four special regions of the light curve between 1978 and 1992 are discussed. The available photometry obtained by the present authors defines at least three consecutive maxima in the variation of the brightness of the system at second maximum and in mid-primary eclipse. The behaviour of the light and colour changes in mid-primary and at second maximum harmonizes with the common property of the RS CVn-type binaries. However, the light changes at first maximum do not resemble either at second maximum or in mid-primary minimum. Therefore, we conclude that the observed features cannot be attributed to the spottedness of the more massive component alone. The signs of the starspots are masked by the matter in front of the more massive component at the first maximum. The present data indicate that the magnetic cycle in RT Lac is about 12 years, which is analogous to the Sun's 11-year sunspot cycle.     

Discovery of cyclic spot activity on the G8 giant HD 208472

We present and analyze 17 consecutive years of UBVRI time‐series photometry of the spotted giant component of the RS CVn binary HD 208472. Our aim is to determine the morphology and the evolution of its starspots by using periodsearch techniques and two‐spot light‐curve modelling. Spots on HD208472 always occur on hemispheres facing the observer during orbital quadrature and flip their location to the opposite hemisphere every approximately six years. The times when the spots change their preferential hemisphere correspond to times when the light curve amplitudes are the smallest and when abrupt changes of the photometric periods are observed. During these times the star is also close to a relative maximum brightness, suggesting a vanishing overall spottedness at each end of the previous cycle and the start of a new one. We find evidence for a 6.28±0.06‐yr brightness cycle, which we interpret to be a stellar analog of the solar 11‐year sunspot cycle. We also present clear evidence for a brightening trend, approximated with a 21.5±0.5‐yr period, possibly due to a stellar analog of the solar Gleissberg cycle. From the two‐spot modelling we also determine an upper limit for the differential‐rotation coefficient of α = ΔP/P of 0.004±0.010, which would be fifty times weaker than on the Sun (© 2010 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

A model‐based data‐driven dictionary learning for seismic data representation

Planar waves events recorded in a seismic array can be represented as lines in the Fourier domain. However, in the real world, seismic events usually have curvature or amplitude variability, which means that their Fourier transforms are no longer strictly linear but rather occupy conic regions of the Fourier domain that are narrow at low frequencies but broaden at high frequencies where the effect of curvature becomes more pronounced. One can consider these regions as localised “signal cones”. In this work, we consider a space–time variable signal cone to model the seismic data. The variability of the signal cone is obtained through scaling, slanting, and translation of the kernel for cone‐limited (C‐limited) functions (functions whose Fourier transform lives within a cone) or C‐Gaussian function (a multivariate function whose Fourier transform decays exponentially with respect to slowness and frequency), which constitutes our dictionary. We find a discrete number of scaling, slanting, and translation parameters from a continuum by optimally matching the data. This is a non‐linear optimisation problem, which we address by a fixed‐point method that utilises a variable projection method with ?₁ constraints on the linear parameters and bound constraints on the non‐linear parameters. We observe that slow decay and oscillatory behaviour of the kernel for C‐limited functions constitute bottlenecks for the optimisation problem, which we partially overcome by the C‐Gaussian function. We demonstrate our method through an interpolation example. We present the interpolation result using the estimated parameters obtained from the proposed method and compare it with those obtained using sparsity‐promoting curvelet decomposition, matching pursuit Fourier interpolation, and sparsity‐promoting plane‐wave decomposition methods.     

Light variations and flares on V471 tauri

Two-colour photometric observations of the white-dwarf and K-dwarf eclipsing binary V471 Tau were made during the last four years. The resulting light curves and thirteen timings of mid-eclipse are presented. During the observations two flares were obtained on September 23 and December23, 1992. Both events occurred just after the fourth contact. The increment in the brightness was measured as 0 _. ^m 067. The energy liberated by the flare was computed to be 5.43 × 10³² erg s^–1 in the JohnsonB band, which amounts 1.13 times that of the total radiation of the K-dwarf.     

Anomalous X-ray pulsars: persistent states with fallback disks

The anomalous X-ray pulsar 4U 0142+61 was recently detected in the mid infrared bands with the SPITZER Observatory (Wang, Chakrabarty and Kaplan: Nature 440, 772 (2006)). This observation is the first instance for a disk around an AXP. From a reanalysis of optical and infrared data, we show that the observations indicate that the disk is likely to be an active disk rather than a passive dust disk beyond the light cylinder, as proposed in the discovering paper. Furthermore, we show that the irradiated accretion disk model can also account for all the optical and infrared observations of the anomalous X-ray pulsars in the persistent state.     

Light-curve analysis of Z Herculis

The blue and yellow light curves of the RS CVn-type eclipsing binary Z Her were analyzed by using Wood's and Nelson. Davis and Etzel's methods. The results obtained by two different approaches are in good agreement. The absolute parameters of the components were also calculated using the parameters derived by Popper from the radial velocities. The physical parameters of the components indicate that the cooler one has separated or has been departing from the Main Sequence.     

Viscous holographic f(Q)cosmology with some versions of holographic dark energy with generalized cut-offs

The work reported in this paper demonstrates the cosmology of f(Q)gravity and the reconstruction of various associated parameters with different versions of hol...     

Estimation of Elastic Modulus of Intact Rocks by Artificial Neural Network

The modulus of elasticity of intact rock (E _i) is an important rock property that is used as an input parameter in the design stage of engineering projects such as dams, slopes, foundations, tunnel constructions and mining excavations. However, it is sometimes difficult to determine the modulus of elasticity in laboratory tests because high-quality cores are required. For this reason, various methods for predicting E _i have been popular research topics in recently published literature. In this study, the relationships between the uniaxial compressive strength, unit weight (γ) and E _i for different types of rocks were analyzed, employing an artificial neural network and 195 data obtained from laboratory tests carried out on cores obtained from drilling holes within the area of three metro lines in Istanbul, Turkey. Software was developed in Java language using Weka class libraries for the study. To determine the prediction capacity of the proposed technique, the root-mean-square error and the root relative squared error indices were calculated as 0.191 and 92.587, respectively. Both coefficients indicate that the prediction capacity of the study is high for practical use.