Recent Patents on Engineering - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2016

Background: A recently developed process entitled Supercritical Antisolvent Fractionation (SAF) was recently described for the fractionation of plant extract solutions using supercritical fluids to give two or more fractions containing bioactive compounds with widely differing polarities. An updated overview of SAF of natural products is presented in this article. Objective: The goal of this work is to show some perspectives about the Read More

Background: With the increasingly serious energy and environmental crises and shortages of conventional energy such as coal and oil, humans have been focusing on new energy sources, especially the abundant wave energy resource. Previous researchers have made great contributions to the design of wave energy converters and have also applied for many patents. However, advanced comprehensive wave energy evalua Read More

Background: Cogeneration systems using biomass materials as woodships, agricultural and municipal solid waste, are well known and used in different places of the world. Today Brazilian sugarcane bagasse is an important energy source to these industries, most of them are self-sufficient in energy consumption and some generate energy surplus that is sold to the grid. There is a tendency forenlarging the electricity produc Read More

Background: This paper presents a three-dimensional antenna array for electronic high-resolution beam spatial scanning. System and Design Structure: The system consists of five identical elements, arranged in a cross shape (3+3), where each element is formed by a Vivaldi planar antenna equipped with a Ultra Wide Band (UWB) pulse generator (PG), connected to a programmable delay circuit (PDC). The Vivaldi an Read More

Background: The most recent seismic events occurred in Italy have highlighted some of the drawbacks of precast concrete industrial buildings and especially those related to the connecting systems traditionally employed to fasten the cladding panels to the internal framing. In fact, in many cases, the out-of-plane collapse of the external walls has been observed due to the problems related to the poor behaviour exhibited un Read More

Background: Warranty shares similarities with insurance in many aspects. Research on insurance data analysis has attracted much more attention than on warranty data analysis. Objective: This paper aims to provide a general comparison between warranty and insurance in terms of their coverages, policies and data collection. Method: The paper reviews existing approaches to insurance data analysis with regard to modell Read More

Background: The fabrication of non-conductive hard and brittle materials like glass or some ceramics is always difficult. The electrochemical discharge machining (ECDM) process is a good selection for the fabrication of non-conductive hard and brittle materials. Objective: In order to achieve the high efficiency machining of non-conductive hard and brittle materials, a micro electrochemical discharge machining tool is Read More