Effect of pre-treatments and post-treatments on drying products

Freeze drying technology can give good quality attributes of vegetables and fruits in terms of color, nutrition, volume, rehydration kinetics, stability during storage, among others, when compared with solely air dried ones. However, published scientific works showed that treatments applied before and after air dehydration are effective in food attributes, improving its quality. Therefore, the hypothesis of the present thesis was focus in a vast research of scientific work that showed the possibility to apply a pre-treatment and a post-treatment to food products combined with conventional air drying aiming being close, or even better, to the quality that a freeze dried product can give. Such attributes are the enzymatic inactivation, stability during storage, drying and rehydration kinetics, color, nutrition, volume and texture/structure. With regard to pre-treatments, the ones studied along the present work were: water blanching, steam blanching, ultrasound, freezing, high pressure and osmotic dehydration. High electric pulsed field was also studied but the food attributes were not explained on detailed. Basically, water and steam blanching showed to be adequate to inactivate enzymes in order to prevent enzymatic browning and preserve the product quality during long storage periods. With regard to ultrasound pre-treatment the published results pointed that ultrasound is an effective pre-treatment to reduce further drying times, improve rehydration kinetics and color retention. On the other hand, studies showed that ultrasound allow sugars losses and, in some cases, can lead to cell disruption. For freezing pre-treatment an overall conclusion was difficult to draw for some food attributes, since, each fruit or vegetable is unique and freezing comprises a lot of variables. However, for the studied cases, freezing showed to be a pre-treatment able to enhance rehydration kinetics and color attributes. High pressure pre-treatment showed to inactivate enzymes improving storage stability of food and showed to have a positive performance in terms of rehydration. For other attributes, when high pressure technology was applied, the literature showed divergent results according with the crops used. Finally, osmotic dehydration has been widely used in food processing to incorporate a desired salt or sugar present in aqueous solution into the cellular structure of food matrix (improvement of nutrition attribute). Moreover, osmotic dehydration lead to shorter drying times and the impregnation of solutes during osmose allow cellular strengthens of food. In case of post-treatments, puffing and a new technology denominated as instant controlled pressure drop (DIC) were reported in the literature as treatments able to improve diverse Abstract Effect of Pre-treatments and Post-treatments on Drying Products x food attributes. Basically, both technologies are similar where the product is submitted to a high pressure step and the process can make use of different heating mediums such as CO2, steam, air and N2. However, there exist a significant difference related with the final stage of both which can comprise the quality of the final product. On the other hand, puffing and DIC are used to expand cellular tissues improving the volume of food samples, helping in rehydration kinetics as posterior procedure, among others. The effectiveness of such pre and/or post-treatments is dependent on the state of the vegetables and fruits used which are also dependent of its cellular structure, variety, origin, state (fresh, ripe, raw), harvesting conditions, etc. In conclusion, as it was seen in the open literature, the application of pre-treatments and post-treatments coupled with a conventional air dehydration aim to give dehydrated food products with similar quality of freeze dried ones. Along the present Master thesis the experimental data was removed due to confidential reasons of the company Unilever R&D Vlaardingen

Implementação do algoritmo (RTM) para processamento sísmico em arquiteturas não convencionais

With the growth of energy consumption worldwide, conventional reservoirs, the reservoirs called "easy exploration and production" are not meeting the global energy demand. This has led many researchers to develop projects that will address these needs, companies in the oil sector has invested in techniques that helping in locating and drilling wells. One of the techniques employed in oil exploration process is the reverse time migration (RTM), in English, Reverse Time Migration, which is a method of seismic imaging that produces excellent image of the subsurface. It is algorithm based in calculation on the wave equation. RTM is considered one of the most advanced seismic imaging techniques. The economic value of the oil reserves that require RTM to be localized is very high, this means that the development of these algorithms becomes a competitive differentiator for companies seismic processing. But, it requires great computational power, that it still somehow harms its practical success. The objective of this work is to explore the implementation of this algorithm in unconventional architectures, specifically GPUs using the CUDA by making an analysis of the difficulties in developing the same, as well as the performance of the algorithm in the sequential and parallel version

Determinação de paclobutrazol em manga por cromatografia líquida de alta eficiência.

Este trabalho descreve um método para determinação de paclobutrazol em amostras de manga. A extração foi feita em metanol e as análises por cromatografia líquida de alta eficiência (CLAE), usando coluna de fase-reversa, C-18, fase móvel metanol/água 60:40, v/v, detecção e quantificação a 220 nm. Os seguintes parâmetros de validação foram obtidos: limite de detecção do método de 0,025 mg kg-1, limite de quantificação do método de 0,050 mg kg-1, linearidade de 0,100?5,00 mg L-1 (r2? 0,9994); recuperação de 82 a 92%, precisão intermediária (%RSD) < 12%, para paclobutrazol. O método mostrou ser simples, eficiente e confiável para a determinação de resíduos de paclobutrazol em amostras de manga.

GEOGRAFIA DO CONTRABANDO DE AGROTÓXICOS NA FRONTEIRA GAÚCHA

O contrabando, em seus aspectos geográficos, adequa seu fluxos e fixos às demandas do mercado, às tecnologias disponíveis e à criminalização e/ou valorização de certos objetos por diferentes agentes. O comércio ilegal de agrotóxicos emerge na fronteira Brasil-Uruguai dado o grande diferencial em termos de legislação e preço. Enquanto no Brasil a produção, a comercialização e o emprego de agrotóxicos é objeto de preocupação entre importantes setores da sociedade, levando a criação de leis de controle e banimento de certas substâncias, no Uruguai, a legislação é mais permissiva e menos implementada. O preço do produto é significativamente menor no Uruguai, onde substâncias geralmente importadas da China são vendidas com margens de lucro menores, sendo ainda desoneradas de alguns custos (certificação, logística reversa do recolhimento de embalagens etc.). Comercializado legalmente no Uruguai, o agrotóxico chinês possui muitas vias de entrada, sendo umas delas a cidade gaúcha de Santana do Livramento, cidade-gêmea de Rivera, no Uruguai, nosso recorte espacial. Daí, o produto é transportado às zonas produtoras (por exemplo, de soja do norte gaúcho). Através do acompanhamento do noticiário da imprensa, de entrevistas com autoridades no assunto e pesquisas em campo, tem-se buscado mapear os caminhos do contrabando e os agentes envolvidos.