Papers by Seyed Mehdi Nassiri
DergiPark (Istanbul University), Aug 1, 2011
Drying is an energy intensive operation in cereal grains production chain. Selection of appropria... more Drying is an energy intensive operation in cereal grains production chain. Selection of appropriate method of drying and operation management has influence on quality of the final product as well as the operational energy for drying. Rice as a strategic products cultivated in some area other than the north of Iran. This crop needs to be dried after harvesting. In this study two local varieties of rough rice (long and moderate grain) were dried by several thin layer dryer included indirect active solar dryer, mixed-mode active solar dryer and continuous dryer, at three temperature levels of 35, 45, and 55 OC . Also, rough rice was dried by sundry method as the traditional and common used method (control treatment). Energy consumption for different parts of aforementioned dryers was measured and determined. Total consumed energy for drying per amount of Head Rice Yield (HRY) was calculated. Results indicated that drying temperature had significant effect on HRY, total energy consumption, and the ratio of total energy consumption per amount of HRY. It was observed that continuous dryer was more efficient according to low ratio of energy consumption to amount of HRY.
Archives of Medical Science, Jan 26, 2009
I In nt tr ro od du uc ct ti io on n: : The emerging fields of tissue engineering and biomaterial... more I In nt tr ro od du uc ct ti io on n: : The emerging fields of tissue engineering and biomaterials have begun to provide potential treatment options for heart failure. Tissue engineering approaches are designed to repair damaged cardiac tissue through the use of cellular transplantation, and biodegradable scaffolds. In an experience for the first time in Iran applying nanobiotechnology in heart tissue engineering, we investigated the outcome of a multi-layer nanostructural scaffold containing cardiac and endothelial cells grafted on the infarcted heart. M Ma at te er ri ia al l a an nd d m me et th ho od ds s: : Myocardial infarction was induced in sheep by ligation of the distal portion of the left anterior descending coronary artery. Biopsy of the left ventricular cardiac muscle and jugular vein was obtained. Tissue samples were isolated and cultured in vitro. Cultured cardiac and endothelial cells were seeded onto the layers of poly(ε-caprolactone)/collagen biodegradable scaffolds. After two months, the scaffold was sutured on the surface of the infarcted myocardium. R Re es su ul lt ts s: : Eight weeks after implantation, there was remarkable thickening as well as decreased paradoxical motion of the ventricular wall in echocardiographic evaluation. There was no significant improvement in global ejection fraction. In microscopic examinations by Masson's trichrome staining and immunohistochemical analysis, viable cells were observed within layers of the scaffold with incorporation of the graft into the adjacent myocardium. There were also spectacular amounts of vascularization in the grafted material. C Co on nc cl lu us si io on ns s: : Our data demonstrate that engrafting of multilayer cell-seeded nanostructural scaffolds can induce angiogenesis in the implanted region. Such tissue engineered cells containing scaffolds are a promising means of tissue cardiomyoplasty in the field of regenerative medicine. Further studies are however encouraged to investigate the physiopathological aspects of heart tissue engineering.
International Journal of Food Properties, Oct 30, 2014
In the present study, X-ray computed tomography was used as a non-destructive technique for volum... more In the present study, X-ray computed tomography was used as a non-destructive technique for volume estimation of two local pomegranate fruit cultivars and their components from Iran (Rabab Malas and Rabab Torsh) with two different sizes. Segmentation of internal components (peel, arils, and seeds) of the fruit was done using Matlab image processing toolbar. A high correlation was observed between extracted image features from computed tomography images and corresponding experimental measurements. The actual volume of whole fruit, peels, arils, seeds, and juice was estimated by computed tomography images nearly 97.8, 97.2, 95.1, 93.5, and 94.4%, respectively for Rabab Malas cultivar. Correspondingly, it was nearly 97.3, 94.7, 94.4, 91.8, and 91.9% for Rabab Torsh. Analysis of linear regression indicated that computed tomography scan as a non-destructive method can suitably estimate the fruit volume and its internal components, and can be employed for in-line fruit quality-monitoring systems.
Iranian Food Science and Technology Research Journal, Nov 21, 2015
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Sep 26, 2012
Iran is one of the greatest producers of date in the world. However due to lack of information ab... more Iran is one of the greatest producers of date in the world. However due to lack of information about its viscoelastic properties, much of the production downgraded during harvesting and postharvesting processes. In this study the effect of temperature and moisture content of product were investigated on stress relaxation characteristics. Therefore, the freshly harvested date (kabkab) at tamar stage were put in controlled environment chamber to obtain different temperature levels (25, 35, 45, and 55 0 C) and moisture contents (8.5, 8.7, 9.2, 15.3, 20, 32.2 %d.b.). A texture analyzer TAXT2 (Stable Microsystems, UK) was used to apply uniaxial compression tests. A chamber capable to control temperature was designed and fabricated around the plunger of texture analyzer to control the temperature during the experiment. As a new approach a CCD camera (A4tech, 30 fps) was mounted on a cylindrical glass probe to scan and record contact area between date and disk. Afterwards, pictures were analyzed using image processing toolbox of Matlab software. Individual date fruit was uniaxially compressed at speed of 1 mm/s. The constant strain of 30% of thickness of date was applied to the horizontally oriented fruit. To select a suitable model for describing stress relaxation of date, experimental data were fitted with three famous stress relaxation models including the generalized Maxwell, Nussinovitch, and Pelege. The constant in mentioned model were determined and correlated with temperature and moisture content of product using non-linear regression analysis. It was found that Generalized Maxwell and Nussinovitch models appropriately describe viscoelastic characteristics of date fruits as compared to Peleg mode.
Journal of Agricultural Machinery, 2017
Introduction Sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) as the second most important world's sugar source ... more Introduction Sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.) as the second most important world's sugar source after sugarcane is one of the major industrial crops. The presence of weeds in sugar beet fields, especially at early growth stages, results in a substantial decrease in the crop yield. It is very important to efficiently eliminate weeds at early growing stages. The first step of precision weed control is accurate detection of weeds location in the field. This operation can be performed by machine vision techniques. Hough transform is one of the shape feature extraction methods for object tracking in image processing which is basically used to identify lines or other geometrical shapes in an image. Generalized Hough transform (GHT) is a modified version of the Hough transform used not only for geometrical forms, but also for detecting any arbitrary shape. This method is based on a pattern matching principle that uses a set of vectors of feature points (usually object edge points) to a re...
Iran Agricultural Research, 2015
ABSTRACT- Bruising degrades the quality of fresh apple fruits. Reducing bruise damage is of utmos... more ABSTRACT- Bruising degrades the quality of fresh apple fruits. Reducing bruise damage is of utmost importance in designing and developing processing equipments. The main objective of the present study was to introduce an analytical method to predict the allowable static load applicable to apple fruits. To predict the strain energy absorbed by the fruit, a point load was applied on the solid spherical object. The strain energy of the spherical element was extended to the whole body using a triple integral in the spherical domain. In order to verify the results, a series of compression tests were carried out using a universal testing machine on an apple kept at two different storage and initial fruit temperatures (zero and 25oC). The results showed a strong polynomial relation with a coefficient of determination of 0.990 between the value of the theoretical stored strain energy and the experimental one. Also, it was found that the size of the bruised area can be determined by its corr...
Precision Agriculture is continuously trying to address the sources and factors affecting the in-... more Precision Agriculture is continuously trying to address the sources and factors affecting the in-field variability and taking appropriate managerial decisions. One of the popular research focuses in the recent three decades has been on the development of new approaches to making yield variability maps. Advancement in development of sensors and the importance of quality factor in high value crops has motivated scientists to investigate real-time and nondestructive testing methods. This study tried to introduce and evaluate a new approach to concurrent yield mapping and to estimate some nutritional qualitative factors of alfalfa production. In this study, yield quantity was determined by measurement of added hay slice in every hay compression cycle by employing a new star wheel and integrating its output with positioning data from Global Positioning System. To predict some nutritional quality properties, measurement of specific shear energy applied on the cutting blade and compressive...
Agricultural Engineering International: The CIGR Journal, 2016
In this study, two local rough rice cultivars (long and medium grain) were dried by three differe... more In this study, two local rough rice cultivars (long and medium grain) were dried by three different drying methods including indirect and mixed-mode active solar dryers, and continuous dryer at three temperature levels of 35°C, 45°C and 55°C. Bending strength of brown rice kernels, percentage of fissured kernels and head rice yield were measured and evaluated. No significant difference between bending strength of dried rough rice kernels by indirect and mixed-mode active solar drying methods was observed. Drying by continuous dryer improved the mechanical strength of kernels by providing tempering periods. Medium size kernels depicted more strength than longer ones. Strong relationships were established between the bending strength of the brown rice kernels and percentage of fissured kernels and as well as head rice yield.
Quality Assurance and Safety of Crops & Foods, Oct 16, 2020
A new aspect covering interactions between cells and their surroundings via electromagnetic waves... more A new aspect covering interactions between cells and their surroundings via electromagnetic waves was introduced by applying ultra-weak photon emission (UPE). The UPE originates from the relaxation of electronically excited species resulting from oxidative metabolic processes and oxidative stress associated with reactive oxygen species (ROS). The ROS plays a critical role in the quality of foods, and their determination is of extreme importance. The ROS and the intensity of the UPE have significantly correlated. The UPE can be effectively monitored by specific instruments such as photomultiplier tube and charged-coupled devices. The current review is devoted to providing an overview of the quality of food products by the aid of UPE via evaluating the correlations between UPE and food quality indices. In this regard, the UPE can be utilized in food quality as a real-time, noninvasive, and nondestructive technique without complex instruments. However, the implementation of the UPE method for evaluation of food quality needs further investigations.
Journal of Agricultural Science and Technology, 2017
Enhancement of antioxidant capacity of plants by natural antioxidants obtained from medicinal pla... more Enhancement of antioxidant capacity of plants by natural antioxidants obtained from medicinal plants can be a simple way to produce stress tolerant plants. Zataria multiflora essential Oil (ZO) is one of the useful antioxidants with potent antioxidant activity. ZO is insoluble in water and can be degraded by light, oxygen, and high temperature. Incorporation of ZO into Poly Vinyl Alcohol (PVA) dispersion is a simple way to improve its stability. In this research, the antioxidant activity of PVA/ZO dispersion was measured by studying the effect of the Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and Hydroxyl radical (HO ) scavenging of the dispersion. The efficiency of the PVA/ZO dispersion on the production of Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate Oxidase (NOX), SuperOxide Dismutase (SOD), and Catalase (CAT) mRNAs in the wheat seedlings in hydroponic condition was investigated too. PVA/ZO dispersion had a non-Newtonian shear-thinning liquid behavior with the negative zeta-potential (-12 mV) and n...
Maize production, which is ranked after wheat and barely in Fars province, Iran, needs a consider... more Maize production, which is ranked after wheat and barely in Fars province, Iran, needs a considerable amount of irrigation water that is not available in scarce water conditions in drought situations. Therefore, proper planting method can improve irrigation water management. The objectives of the present study were to investigate the effects of two planting methods, on-bed and in furrow bottom, on maize growth and yield, and also on soil water content in root zone at different irrigation regimes in a semi-arid condition. The results can be used for improving or designing appropriate machinery maize cropping in-bottom of furrows. Experimental treatments were applied: water at amounts of 60, 80 and 100% of crop evapotranspiraton (ETc), and two planting methods on-bed and in-bottom of furrow were used. The experiment was conducted and analysed in a split-plot design with three replications. Results revealed that the irrigation regimes and planting methods had significant effects on gra...
In this paper, non parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was subjected to the energy data of... more In this paper, non parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was subjected to the energy data of wheat producers in Punjab state, India, and technical, pure technical and scale efficiencies were calculated for farms both category wise and zone wise. The main objective was to determine the strength of the correlation between non-parametric efficiencies and indices such as energy ratio and specific energy. Results revealed that larger farms had a higher energy ratio and lower specific energy as compared to smaller ones. Frequency distribution of technical efficiency scores revealed that large farms were more consistent on efficiency scores, and the dispersion of technical efficiency was highest on medium farms followed by semi Medium and small farms. The correlation coefficients between energy ratio and each technical, pure and scale efficiency, as well as those between specific energy and each technical, pure and scale efficiency showed that energy ratio and specific energy are not ...
Information Processing in Agriculture, 2021
Drying Technology, 2021
The detection of grain pests is of great significance to grain storage. However, in practice, bec... more The detection of grain pests is of great significance to grain storage. However, in practice, because the size of grain insects is too small to identify. In this paper, the feature fusion SSD(single shot multi-box detector) algorithm based on the Top-Down strategy was proposed. Firstly, the Top-Down module is used to fuse the output characteristics of conv4 and conv5, and the block 11 which is not conducive to small object detection is deleted. Secondly, K-means clustering algorithm is used to cluster prior bounding boxes and made them more suitable for grain pests, which improves the performance on small object detection of grain pests. Five methods were used to enhance the self-made dataset of grain pests, and the enhanced dataset reached 9990 images. Experiments on the enhanced dataset show that the optimized model achieves a mAP (mean Average Precision) 96.89% with detection speed of 0.040s per image. Compared with 95.45% of the mAP achieved by the original SSD algorithm, the proposed model has a great improvement on detection performance. Compared with two-stages Faster R-CNN (mAP is 90.53% and speed is 0.115s per image), YOLOv3, TDFSSD and EfficentDet (D2, D1), the speed and accuracy of the optimized SSD algorithm have obvious advantages. The experimental results show that the proposed SSD model has a good performance on small object detection of grain pests and has a certain guiding significance for subsequent grain pest image detection. INDEX TERMS Grain pests, small object, SSD, feature fusion, Top-Down, K-means clustering.
Scientia Horticulturae, 2021
Abstract Date palm is a dioecious tree that bearing male and female inflorescence on separate tre... more Abstract Date palm is a dioecious tree that bearing male and female inflorescence on separate trees. Although pollination of date palm occurs naturally, in order to guarantee productivity, the artificial pollination can be carried out in commercial date farms. Up to now, an efficient mechanical pollinator has not been developed, and pollination is still carried out manually in most date farms. In this regard, an ultra-light, efficient electrical date palm pollinator was designed and developed consists of a ducted fan, a body and container composed of light polyethylene terephthalate (PET), and a 6.5 m long boom, which was made from carbon fiber. The apparatus overall weight was less than 2 kg, which makes the apparatus as a portable machine to sprinkle pollen/pollen-flour blend. The container had the capacity of approximately 70 g pollen, which could pollinate up to 140 trees in each charge. The pollinator performance was evaluated on the Mazafati cultivar by the aid of a complete randomized designed experiment with five pollinated treatments (traditional, 0.5 g pollen, 2.5 g pollen, 5.5 g pollen-flour blend, and 2.5 g pollen with no repetition) and a non-pollinated treatment. Furthermore, the pollination and fruit setting efficiencies, pollen consumption index (fruits/g pollen), and the airflow characteristics of the pollinator were determined. Therefore, a model was introduced to determine the required pollen or blend (pollen-flour) mass flow rate as a function of discharged air velocity. According to findings, no significant difference was noted regarding the pollination and fruit setting efficiencies among five pollination treatments (p-value
Food Analytical Methods, 2018
Information Processing in Agriculture, 2019
Abstract Dielectric spectroscopy has been employed as a simple, low cost and a non-destructive wa... more Abstract Dielectric spectroscopy has been employed as a simple, low cost and a non-destructive way for prediction of some physicochemical indices of kiwifruit during storage. A parallel-plate capacitor was developed and supplied with sinusoidal voltage waves within a frequency range of 40 kHz – 20 MHz. Dielectric properties of samples were measured by the dielectric sensor. Additionally, changes associated with fruit ripening properties, including firmness, total soluble solid (TSS) and pH were determined as a function of time at 2 °C. The results showed that storage time significantly affected the quality characteristics of kiwifruit. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) were employed to develop models for prediction of quality indices from dielectric properties at the swept frequencies. Dielectric property features were selected as inputs while the quality indices including firmness, TSS and pH were chosen as output for the ANNs. The obtained models were able to predict the firmness, soluble solids content, and pH of kiwifruit non-destructively. Among predictive models, an ANN with a topology of 20-19-1 gave a perfect capability to predict the kiwifruit firmness with R2 value of 0.92. Results of this research show that this technique can be used as an efficient and non-destructive method for kiwifruit quality evaluation and monitoring the ripening.
Biosystems Engineering, 2017
Weed detection is a complicated problem which needs several sources of information to be gathered... more Weed detection is a complicated problem which needs several sources of information to be gathered for successful discrimination. In this paper wavelet texture features were examined to verify their potential in weed detection in a sugar beet crop. Successive steps in a discrimination algorithm were designed to determine the wavelet texture features for each image sub-division to be fed to an artificial neural network. Co-occurrence texture features were determined for each multi-resolution image produced by single-level wavelet transform. Image segmentation was based on the decision made by neural network to label each sub-division as weed or main crop. Optimisation of the algorithm was tried by investigating two manners of discrimination of weeds from the main crop. Principal Component Analysis was used to select 14 from the 52 extracted texture features. Results demonstrated that the wavelet texture features were able to effectively discriminate weeds among the crops even when there was significant amount of occlusion and leaves overlapping.
LWT - Food Science and Technology, 2017
Neste artigo propomos a associação entre literatura e turismo como uma forma de promover o turism... more Neste artigo propomos a associação entre literatura e turismo como uma forma de promover o turismo arquitetónico na região do Algarve, de contribuir para a preservação deste património material e de aumentar a oferta turística nas localidades mais interiores do Algarve. Assim, focamo-nos nas casas tradicionais algarvias e observamos como a sua apresentação enquanto produto complementar da experiência turística implica apenas a sua renomeação como lugar literário e lugar turístico, não envolvendo qualquer transformação ou manipulação negativa deste património. Consequentemente, neste trabalho apresentamos uma seleção de representações literárias das casas tradicionais algarvias em textos de autores portugueses e mostramos como esses retratos têm o potencial de enriquecer e promover as experiências turísticas na região. As casas tradicionais algarvias são lugares que vale a pena visitar pela sua autenticidade, pelo que se escreveu sobre elas, por tudo o que a sua arquitetura revela sobre as pessoas e o espaço algarvio e, também, pela sua beleza enquanto objecto estético. O olhar sobre as casas tradicionais algarvias mediado pelos textos literários tem o duplo potencial de promover as obras e os autores portugueses e, ainda, de motivar a recuperação e a preservação deste património arquitetónico. Palavras-chave: casas tradicionais; Algarve; turismo arquitetónico; literatura de turismo.
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Papers by Seyed Mehdi Nassiri