Heritage Institute of Technology

About: Heritage Institute of Technology is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Steganography & Support vector machine. The organization has 581 authors who have published 1045 publications receiving 8345 citations.

Kinetic analysis and parametric optimization for bioaugmentation of oil from oily wastewater with hydrocarbonoclastic Rhodococcus pyridinivorans F5 strain

Abstract: Bioaugmentation is the most coveted bioremediation technology in present days that is being widely quested around the world for the treatment of wastewater. The present study thus investigates the bioaugmentation capability of the isolated hydrocarbonoclastic bacterium Rhodococcus pyridinivorans F5 in polymeric entrapment to degrade hydrocarbons from oily wastewater. The strain showed high hydrocarbon tolerance ability as high as 8% (v/v) hydrocarbon concentration. Optimization of the growth conditions was simulated using response surface methodology (RSM), which was found and validated at the temperature 37 °C with neutral pH for a wide range of salinity. Maximum percentage degradation of hydrocarbon was seen as 79( ± 0.03)% for the system comprising of both free and emulsified form of oil using the isolated strain in free bacterial suspension state. While the degradation percentage was increased to 86( ± 0.028)% with the cell entrapped alginate bead without the presence of activated carbon as the doped agent. After doping activated carbon with the alginate bead the percentage degradation was further increased to 95( ± 0.02)%. It was studied that with the entrapment technology the sustainability of the technology enhances because of the enhanced recyclability of the microbial cells in bioaugmenting the oil from oily wastewater. Statistical interpretation showed that the degree of hydrocarbon degradation was significantly sensitive to both the state of presence of oil in an oily-water system (F = 444.8 > F critical = 6 . 9 ) and the presence of bacterial form (either free bacterial suspension or immobilized state) (F = 168.1 > F critical = 6 . 9 ).

Optimization of sensor array in electronic nose by combinational feature selection method

Abstract: Electronic nose (e-nose) is a machine olfaction system and the sensor array is an essential part of the electronic olfaction process. A pattern recognition unit is necessary in electronic nose system to efficiently decide about the output of the test using the responses of all the sensors in the array. The output of a pattern recognition algorithm depends on the quality of the feature set used for training and testing. Relevant and independent feature set improves the performance of a pattern classification algorithm. In some applications of electronic nose, the responses of few sensors are highly corrupted with noise and are either irrelevant or are redundant to the process. These sensors should be identified and eliminated from the sensor system for better accuracy. This paper addresses the selection of sensors in an e-nose system by different feature selection methods and then integrates them to achieve improved classification performance. We have used three types of feature selection methods namely, t-statistics, Fisher's criterion and minimum redundancy maximum relevance (MRMR) technique to select the most informative features. We have tested the proposed method on data obtained from the major aroma producing chemicals of black tea. Multi-class support vector machine (SVM) has been used as a pattern classifier in an electronic nose with black tea samples. The experimental results show that the performance of the e-nose system increased by 6–10% with the use of the proposed combinational feature selection technique.

Wood-Based Cellulose Nanofibrils: Haemocompatibility and Impact on the Development and Behaviour of Drosophila melanogaster

Abstract: Wood-based cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) offer an excellent scaffold for drug-delivery formulation development. However, toxicity and haemocompatibility of the drug carrier is always an important issue. In this study, toxicity-related issues of CNF were addressed. Different doses of CNF were orally administered to Drosophila and different tests like the developmental cycle, trypan blue exclusion assay, larva crawling assay, thermal sensitivity assay, cold sensitivity assay, larval light preference test, climbing behaviour, nitroblue tetrazolium (NBT) reduction assay, adult phenotype, and adult weight were conducted to observe the impact on its development and behaviour. A haemocompatibility assay was done on the blood taken from healthy Wistar rats. In Drosophila, the abnormalities in larval development and behaviour were observed in the behavioural assays. However, the cytotoxic effect could not be confirmed by the gut staining and level of reactive oxygen species. The larvae developed into an adult without any abnormality in the phenotype. The CNF did cause loss of weight in the adult flies and did not cause much toxicity within the body since there was no phenotypic defect. Hemolysis data also suggested that CNF was safe at lower doses, as the data was well within acceptable limits. All these results suggest that cellulose nanofibres have no significant cytotoxic effects on Drosophila. However, the developmental and behavioural abnormalities suggest that CNF may act as a behavioural teratogen.