Papers by Keyword: Watermelon

Abstract: Special Region of Yogyakarta is one of the regions that has high potential for natural disasters. Food is the most consumable material which is needed when natural disasters occur. An alternative form of food preservative is needed to maintain nutritious foods that will be distributed to the victims of natural disasters. The foods must still appropriate to eat. In this research, watermelon rind was chosen as an ingredient to make natural preservatives because they contain flavonoids and anthocyanins. This research aims were to determine the total content of anthocyanins, flavonoids and phenolics in the red watermelon rind and yellow watermelon rind, also to determine the effect of chitosan composition to the ability of flavonoids and phenolics release in the food. This research was carried out by extraction and encapsulation methods. The analysis included the content of Total Anthocyanin (TA), Total Flavonoids (TF) and Total Phenolic (TPC) in the supernatant. The other analysis was in vitro tests that was done to know the ability of flavonoids and phenolics release in the food. The total anthocyanin content in the red watermelon rind was 0.0334 mg L^-1 while in the yellow watermelon rind was 0.0668 mg L^-1. The total content of flavonoids in the red watermelon rind was 0.7369 g mL^-1, while in the yellow watermelon rind was 0.3296 g mL^-1. The total phenolic content of red watermelon rind was 0.3669 g mL^-1, while in the yellow watermelon rind was 0.2273 g mL^-1. In both of red and yellow watermelon rind, the highest release of flavonoid and phenolic levels showed in the variations of chitosan mass 0.4 grams. The highest flavonoid content released was 0.0638 g mL^-1 in red watermelon rind and 0.0702 g mL^-1 in yellow watermelon rind. The highest phenolic content released was 0.0321 g mL^-1 in red watermelon rind and 0.0408 g mL^-1 in yellow watermelon rind.

Abstract: Carotenoids, the naturally occurring isoprenoids form essential components of photosynthetic antenna and reaction centre complexes. Thus they play a significant role in absorption, dissipation and transfer of light energy for the process of photosynthesis. The expression of salt stress on carotenoid gene in watermelon leaves were studied. For that watermelon plants were subjected to different concentration of salt water. Morphological characters such as plant height, no. of fruits per plant,chlorophyll content and expression of four major carotenoid pathway genes such as phytoene synthase(PSY), phytoene desaturase(PDS), zeta carotene desaturase(ZDS) and lycopene beta cyclase(LCY-β) were analysed. The quantitative expression analysis using real time PCR has shown a decrease in the expression of all the studied genes as the salt concentration increased. Among the different concentrations of NaCl used for the experiment, it was seen that 200 mM was most detrimental for the carotenoid gene expression.Lycopene beta cyclase, the enzyme that converts lycopene to beta carotene was seen to be highly affected compared to other genes studied showing a 1.87 fold inhibition in its expression at 200 mM NaCl.

Abstract: Dynamic characteristic of a system have to be obtained so as to offer the reliable data for the system dynamic modification and dynamic optimum design. The system modal parameters identification can be changed into the global optimization problem in wavelet plane because the wavelet ridges can carry much information of system characteristic parameters. Firstly, the paper will introduce the so-called PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) technique into the modal analysis and propose the PSO wavelet ridge extraction algorithm. Furthermore, the formulas identifying modal parameters from a wavelet ridge are derived and computation steps were given. The simulation experiments are implemented in order to evaluate precision of this method and the robustness of noise. Finally, the proposed method applies to the modal parameters identification of a watermelon to explore the effectiveness. The experiment results prove the method is precision and insensitive to noise.

Abstract: Watermelons are usually sorted by theirs weight and internal quality. Some automated watermelon weight sorters have been developed and operated in watermelon production areas. However, inspection of internal quality of watermelon is still performed by manually. Principal method of identifying internal defect of watermelon is analyzing the percussion sound of watermelon by human experts. Development of non-destructive evaluation technique for internal quality of watermelon is required to reduce human decision errors. The objective of this study was to develop a non-destructive sorting system which can detect internal defect of watermelons. The internal defect evaluation system has a constant-force hitting hammer to generate the acoustic sound, a multi-point sound signal acquiring system, a noise removal circuit, and a signal processing and quality evaluation program. An internal quality prediction model by PLSR (Partial Least Square Regression) was developed by analyzing the percussion sound of watermelons. Using the developed model, the prediction result shows that the overall prediction accuracy was 90.1%, and severely defected watermelons were identified perfectly.