Drying experiments have been carried out with model soils made of different pastes filling granular packings. A detailed information concerning the time evolution of the water saturation distribution inside the sample was obtained from magnetic resonance imaging measurements. This study makes it possible to understand the physical origin of the drying characteristics of these materials. The dry...

Chitin nanowhiskers are structured into mesoporous aerogels by using the same benign process used previously in our group to make cellulose nanowhisker aerogels. The nanowhiskers are sonicated in water to form a hydrogel before solvent-exchange with ethanol and drying under supercritical CO2 (scCO2 ). Aerogels are prepared with various densities and porosities, relating directly to the initial ...

Intelligent computer-vision system for automated inspection of food safety and quality (SAIF) developed on the basis of compact CCD camera with IEEE-1396 interface and configurable software (IMAQ TM 6.1, Lab VIEW 7.0) is presented. It offers an extensive set of optimized functions for advanced image acquisition, segmentation, feature extraction, data analysis, spatial measurement and calibratio...

Sliced fruits (apple and kiwi) were dried under atmospheric freeze-drying (AFD) and/or low-temperature drying (LTD) conditions, the kinetics, resultant degree of shrinkage, vitamin C retention evaluated. The air temperature programs set in range −20 to 10 °C, impact sub-zero setting was investigated. As expected, shortening time increasing led a shorter total time. Notably, application freezing...

Pigmented coatings, used to improve optical and printing properties, are applied to fibrous paper substrates as slurry, which then dries. We have elucidated the mechanism of the shrinkage which occurs during drying. The void space of the dry coating layers and their effective solid skeletal elements were modelled using the porous network simulation software Pore-Cor. The water-filled porous str...