dried figs collected from various exporting companies (2,461 samples) and local stores (219 samples) were analyzed using reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (rp-hplc) to determine and compare the incidence of aflatoxins, the effectiveness of the regulation limits and monitoring system to select non-compliant samples and the mean daily aflatoxin exposures. the incidence rates of...

external and internal changes in fruits during storage time are affected by the various factors that some of them can by studied by measuring the qualitative parameters (physical and mechanical). the effects of storage time on some physical and mechanical properties of valencia orange were investigated. the experiment was performed as factorial based on completely randomized design. analysis of...

Rupture, bond breaking, or extraction from a deep and narrow potential well requires considerable force while producing minimal displacement. In thermally fluctuating systems, there is not a single force required to achieve rupture, but a spectrum, as thermal forces can both augment and inhibit the bond breaking. We demonstrate measurement and interpretation of the distribution of rupture force...

safflower is a strategic plant regarding to its valuable nutrition value (45% extractable oil) and industrial uses. due to massive import of edible oil to the country as well as high potential for safflower cultivation, the research on production of safflower for oil extrusion purpose is of remarkable importance. the design of various processing and oil extraction units and also their optimizat...

In enhanced oil recovery (EOR), the micro-oil droplet heavily affected the stability of foam and prevented foam flooding. In this paper, the oil bridge-stretching mechanism of foam rupture was described through molecular dynamics with the aim of providing supplements to the experiments at the molecular level. Two important phenomena for foam rupture have been pointed out by the simulation. One ...

Using Langevin dynamics simulations, we study effects of the shear force on the rupture of a double stranded DNA molecule. The model studied here contains two single diblock copolymers interacting with each other. The elastic constants of individual segments of diblock copolymer are considered to be different. We showed that the magnitude of the rupture force depends on whether the force is app...

We use a modified conducting atomic force microscope to simultaneously probe the conductance of a single-molecule junction and the force required to rupture the junction formed by alkanes terminated with four different chemical link groups which vary in binding strength and mechanism to the gold electrodes. Molecular junctions with amine, methylsulfide, and diphenylphosphine terminated molecule...

Single molecule force spectroscopy probes the strength, lifetime, and energetic details of intermolecular interactions in a simple experiment. A growing number of these studies have reported distinctly nonlinear trends in rupture force with loading rate that are typically explained in conventional models by invoking complex escape pathways. Recent analyses suggested that these trends should be ...

Lipid adhesion forces can be measured using several experimental techniques, but none of these techniques provide insight on the atomic level. Therefore, we performed extensive nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations of a phospholipid membrane in the liquid-crystalline phase out of which individual lipid molecules were pulled. In our method, as an idealization of the experimental setups, ...

We study the forced rupture of adhesive contacts between monomers that are not covalently linked in a Rouse chain. When the applied force (f) to the chain end is less than the critical force for rupture (f{c}), the reversible rupture process is coupled to the internal Rouse modes. If f/f{c}>1 the rupture is irreversible. In both limits, the nonexponential distribution of contact lifetimes, whic...