Recent Patents on Engineering - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2014

The extract of Pfaffia glomerata or Brazilian ginseng roots (BGR) has several saponins with surfactant activity, of which the most important is beta-ecdysone due to its biological activity. Therefore, the aim of this study was to obtain an extract rich in saponins from BGR using the commercially established low-pressure (that is, extraction performed at ambient pressure) solvent extraction (LPSE) method with and without ultrasound assistance. The effects of the extraction method chosen (LPSE, LPSE assisted by continuous ultrasound, UAE; LPSE assisted by ultrasound at the beginning of the process, BUAE; and LPSE assisted by pulsed ultrasound PUAE), the temperature (40 and 60°C) and the extracting solvents (water, ethanol:water [35:65, v/v], ethanol:water [70:30, v/v], isopropanol:water [35:65, v/v] and isopropanol: water [70:30, v/v]) were evaluated with respect to the global extraction yield (X0), emulsification index (E24) and reduction of water surface tension (RWST) by means of statistical analysis. A kinetic study was performed to determine the best extraction process conditions for each response variable (X0, E24 and RWST). Additionally, beta-ecdysone content was measured for the extracts obtained from the kinetic study. The highest X0 was 64 % (dry basis) obtained by LPSE at 60°C using water as the extracting solvent. Nonetheless, the extract with the largest E24 (approximately 50 %) and RWST (36 %) were obtained by PUAE and BUAE, respectively, at 60°C using isopropanol:water (70:30, v/v) as the extracting solvent. In the kinetic study, it was observed that beta-ecdysone yield ranged from 1.0-1.3 %. This novel process has been further described, and inventor rights have been claimed in an invention patent application (BR 1020130128961).

Design of re-locatable industrial facilities is a new concept that evolved over the past few years due to the significant savings in project costs. Little guidelines are available in current codes of practice or in published literature to address the engineering challenges encountered in relocating industrial facilities. The paper sheds light on the requirements to design re- locatable structure. Industrial examples are also provided. A brief description is also given to illustrate the characteristics of the Self-Propelled Modular Transporter (SPMT) system. The engineering drawing requirements for the relocation procedure are also discussed. Design guidelines are proposed for practicing engineers in order to develop reliable relocation strategy. The paper also reviews engineering patents related to the subject.

The Magnus force was successfully employed by Flettner in his ship Buckau operating with two large propelling cylinders. The spinning cylinders produced propulsive force from the wind on seas as a clean and free source of energy. The rise of fossil fuel costs, extinction of fossil fuel resources, and environmental issues such as global warming and pollutions produced by fossil fuels have caused a renew interest in Flettner type propulsion in naval ships. This is becoming a hot topic in Europe and the rest of world. Many other applications of producing high lift values from spinning symmetrical cylinders have failed due to high values of drag force and also rapid increase of frictional torques. In this patent, the new application of Treadmill-Magnus, wind driven propulsion system is introduced which can be effectively used for any size ships. To show validity of the concept, the NACA0020 aerofoil section with treadmill skin is computationally investigated at the low Reynolds number of 8.2x104. The viscous fluid flow solutions were obtained at variety of treadmill speeds of the aerofoil skin and different incident angles. The results show that high lift to drag ratios may be obtained using treadmill motion.

Microencapsulation is the process of placing a microscopic wall around a core made of active molecules to protect or convey. This technique is object of several researches and experiments and can be adapted to a number of industrial applications. This work is an overview of the main European, U.S., and international patents concerning applications of microencapsulation in the field of food and pest control, developed in the last 15 years. Innovation in this sector involves the choice of encapsulating materials, active molecules to be encapsulated and methods of encapsulation.

Facial Recognition has gained interested of many researchers due to its various purposes and practical applications. Recent developments in 3D imaging technology have made it possible to use a true 3D mesh of the face for recognition. Moreover, it is now also possible to use 4D data (3D meshes changing over time) from publicly-available databases. Since the use of 3D and 4D data promises to bypass many of the issues that plague 2D images and video, such as pose and facial expression variations, the challenge is to perform expression analysis on 3D and 4D domains to achieve high face recognition rate. The key contribution of this article is two fold, firstly, we present various 3D Face Recognition techniques and secondly, we present a systematic pipeline for 4D Face Recognition (dynamic 3D sequences) which consist of Mesh Matching, RANdomSAmple Consensus (RANSAC), consecutive Annotated Face Model (AFM) Fitting and Feature Description. We evaluated both latest state of the art 3D and 4D Facial Recognition pipelines on two publicly available facial expression databases BU-3DFE and BU-4DFE and made the following observations. Among various 3D face recognition algorithms analysed Matching Tensors for Pose Invariant Automatic 3D Face Recognition gives the best recognition rate of 96.4% on BU-3DFE. Among various 4D face recognition algorithms, a dynamic geometry-based approach for 4D facial expressions recognition gives the best recognition rate of 96.71% on BU-4DFE. We have also considered several patents, such as ‘Face recognition apparatus, face recognition method, Gabor filter application apparatus, and computer program’ ‘Gabor filtering and joint sparsity model-based face recognition method’ ‘Principal component analysisbased (PCA-based) three-dimensional (3D) face recognition system’ ‘3d face recognition method based on intermediate frequency information in geometric image’ ‘Three-dimensional human face recognition method based on intermediate frequency information in geometry image’.

Modularization procedures result in substantial cost savings in mega Oil & Gas projects. Little industrial guidelines are available in North American and European codes of practice for effective modular constructions. Attempts were made over the past few years by EPCM companies to develop design rules to improve modularization strategies and meet the aggressive industrial demands. Unfortunately, absence of industrial rules has generated randomness in the design procedure with no technical justifications. The paper offers cost effective strategies and industrial guidelines that can be used by practicing engineers and steel fabricators for modular steel designs for Oil & Gas projects. Structural, piping, mechanical and electrical engineering guidelines are briefly discussed. Several examples are provided for various process & building facilities to illustrate the efficiency of these modularization strategies. The described procedures and recommendations can be used in practice to maximize the project savings in the Oil & Gas industry.

Risk management (RM) is an ongoing systematic approach which tends to predict future problems facing any product development process by analyzing loops of gathered or stored data and communicating their impact to enable design decision-making. It identifies problems, analyzes data, models and implements solutions and performs ongoing monitoring to assure that the corrective and/or preventive actions are being considered. As the majority of medical devices are monitoring devices, data communication and analysis play a crucial role in predicting the effectiveness and safety of a device. Device related data, patient related data and device-patient related data are great sources for enhancing either new designs or improving already existing ones. Analyzing such data can provide researchers and device development teams with a complete justification and patterns of interest about performance, life and safety. This paper introduces a review of the existing patents in the field of medical devices RM procedures, techniques and technologies as a mandatory requirement by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the device approval and marketing. The paper focuses on the body of literature during three main stages of the device lifecycle; the design stage, the manufacturing stage and the device- user interface stage. The aim is to highlight major practices and their similarities as well as differences and future expectations for medical device risk assessment techniques. The authors use this study to guide the establishing of a new technique to quantify risk at the early design stage using device performance data under the umbrella of the RM procedure.

There are 3 state of the art approaches for recognizing faces under varying poses. These 3 approaches are Overlapping Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Hybrid Spatial Feature Interdependence Matrix (HSFIM) and Score Level Fusion Techniques (SLFT). The train and test images are considered from standard public face data bases: Head Pose Image Database, Sheffield Face Database, and Indian Face Database. The key contribution of this article is, we have developed and analyzed the 3 state of the art approaches for recognizing faces under varying poses using a common set of train and test images. This evaluation gives us the exact face recognition rates of the 3 systems under varying poses. We have considered patents ‘Face recognition apparatus, face recognition method, gabor filter application apparatus, and computer program’ ‘Gabor filtering and joint sparsity model-based face recognition method’ ‘Face identification method based on multiscale weber local descriptor and kernel group sparse representation’.