Poor sanitation is one of the major hindrances to the global sustainable development goals. The Reinvent the Toilet Challenge of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is set to develop affordable, next-generation sanitary systems that can ensure safe treatment and wide accessibility without compromise on sustainable use of natural resources and the environment. Energy recovery from human excret...

A fungal strain, Aspergillus terreus strain GA2, isolated from an agricultural field cultivating sweet sorghum, produced feruloyl esterase using maize bran. In order to obtain maximum yields of feruloyl esterase, the solid state fermentation (SSF) conditions for enzyme production were standardized. Effective feruloyl esterase production was observed with maize bran as substrate followed by whea...

Rheological properties are very important parameters in the production of products with high-quality and desirable texture. So far, many attempts to produce low-calorie milk chocolate have not succeeded. Therefore, the present study aims to evaluate the effects of sugar substitutes on rheological characteristics of prebiotic milk chocolate using Simplex-lattice mixture design. For doing this, a...

Chhana cake, locally termed chhana podo, is a baked traditional dairy product of India. The present study was undertaken for optimization of process parameters pertaining to production of chhana podo. Independent variables, namely, moisture content of feed-mix: 52.5 62.5% (wb), baking temperature: 60 180°C, baking time: 1 9 h and height of feed-mix: 1 5 cm were selected heuristically and their ...

Artificial neural networks (ANN) and response surface methodology (RSM) were used to build a model to describe the effects of four independent variables (moisture content, concentrations of glucose, ammonium nitrate and methionine) on the yield of cephalosporin C (CPC) from Acremonium chrysogenum under solid state fermentation. The respective uses of RSM and ANN were found to be effective in lo...

a fully instrumented air conditioning laboratory unit capable of controlling drying air temperature and humidity integrated with an instantaneous weighing thin layer drying system was used to investigate the thin layer drying behavior and desorption equilibrium moisture content of canola (brassica napus l.). to this aim, freshly harvested canola samples with moisture content of about 12±0.5% (d...

The assessment of soil moisture content and surface roughness from remotely sensed data is of primary importance for improving agricultural techniques of conservation farming such as yield forecasts, scheduling irrigations, fertilization. SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) remotely sensed data may provide a powerful tool for indirectly retrieving these agricultural surface parameters over large are...

Drying: moisture measurement at the end of drying is essential to follow up drying course and to decide whether it is achieved or not. On one hand, too long a drying course may have bad consequences for quality and food safety because of unexpected fermentations and mould growth. On the other hand, the next step in the process is storage. Also, drying to a too low moisture content can result in...