National Technical University of Athens

About: National Technical University of Athens is a education organization based out in Athens, Attiki, Greece. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Large Hadron Collider & Nonlinear system. The organization has 13445 authors who have published 31259 publications receiving 723504 citations. The organization is also known as: Athens Polytechnic & NTUA.

Utilization of Plant By-Products for the Recovery of Proteins, Dietary Fibers, Antioxidants, and Colorants

Abstract: Processing of fruits, vegetables, and oilseeds results in high amounts of waste materials such as peels, seeds, stones, and oilseed meals. Disposal of these materials usually represents a problem that is further aggravated by legal restrictions. Plant waste is prone to microbial spoilage; therefore, drying is necessary before further exploitation. The cost of drying, storage, and transport poses additional economical limitations to waste utilization. Therefore, agroindustrial waste often is utilized as feed or fertilizer. However, demand for feed or fertilizer varies and depends on agricultural production. Moreover, valuable nutrients contained in agroindustrial wastes are lost. Thus new aspects concerning the use of these wastes as by-products for further exploitation on the production of food additives or supplements with high nutritional value have gained increasing interest because these are high-value products and their recovery may be economically attractive. It is well known that agroindustrial by-products are rich in dietary fibers, some of which contain appreciable amounts of colorants, antioxidant compounds or other substances with positive health effects, while some of them, like the oilseed meals, are rich in proteins. Dietary fibers consist of polysaccharides and lignin that are neither digested nor absorbed in the human small intestine. The beneficial role of dietary fibers in reducing risk of coronary heart disease and certain types of cancer has been pointed out by several epidemiological studies. The recommended daily intake is 30–45 g per day and person, while the estimated consumption in the West

The logic of EGFR/ErbB signaling: theoretical properties and analysis of high-throughput data

Abstract: The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) signaling pathway is probably the best-studied receptor system in mammalian cells, and it also has become a popular example for employing mathematical modeling to cellular signaling networks. Dynamic models have the highest explanatory and predictive potential; however, the lack of kinetic information restricts current models of EGFR signaling to smaller sub-networks. This work aims to provide a large-scale qualitative model that comprises the main and also the side routes of EGFR/ErbB signaling and that still enables one to derive important functional properties and predictions. Using a recently introduced logical modeling framework, we first examined general topological properties and the qualitative stimulus-response behavior of the network. With species equivalence classes, we introduce a new technique for logical networks that reveals sets of nodes strongly coupled in their behavior. We also analyzed a model variant which explicitly accounts for uncertainties regarding the logical combination of signals in the model. The predictive power of this model is still high, indicating highly redundant sub-structures in the network. Finally, one key advance of this work is the introduction of new techniques for assessing high-throughput data with logical models (and their underlying interaction graph). By employing these techniques for phospho-proteomic data from primary hepatocytes and the HepG2 cell line, we demonstrate that our approach enables one to uncover inconsistencies between experimental results and our current qualitative knowledge and to generate new hypotheses and conclusions. Our results strongly suggest that the Rac/ Cdc42 induced p38 and JNK cascades are independent of PI3K in both primary hepatocytes and HepG2. Furthermore, we detected that the activation of JNK in response to neuregulin follows a PI3K-dependent signaling pathway.

Effect of Liquid Films on the Drying of Porous Media

Abstract: The effect is studied of capillarity-driven viscous flow through macroscopic liquid films during the isothermal drying of porous materials. A mathematical model that accounts for viscous flow in a 2-D pore network, through both the liquid films and the bulk liquid phase, is presented. The results are compared with previous works that do not account for the effect of films and with experimental findings by other authors. It is shown that film flow is a major transport mechanism in the drying of porous materials, its effect being dominant when capillarity controls the process, which is the case in typical applications. By contrast, viscous flow in the bulk contributes negligibly. The results are then generalized to drying under an applied temperature gradient. © 2004 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 50: 2721–2737, 2004

Impacts of European drought events: insights from an international database of text-based reports

Abstract: Drought is a natural hazard that can cause a wide range of impacts affecting the environment, society, and the economy. Providing an impact assessment and reducing vulnerability to these impacts for regions beyond the local scale, spanning political and sectoral boundaries, requires systematic and detailed data regarding impacts. This study presents an assessment of the diversity of drought impacts across Europe based on the European Drought Impact report Inventory (EDII), a unique research database that has collected close to 5000 impact reports from 33 European countries. The reported drought impacts were classified into major impact categories, each of which had a number of subtypes. The distribution of these categories and types was then analyzed over time, by country, across Europe and for particular drought events. The results show that impacts on agriculture and public water supply dominate the collection of drought impact reports for most countries and for all major drought events since the 1970s, while the number and relative fractions of reported impacts in other sectors can vary regionally and from event to event. The analysis also shows that reported impacts have increased over time as more media and website information has become available and environmental awareness has increased. Even though the distribution of impact categories is relatively consistent across Europe, the details of the reports show some differences. They confirm severe impacts in southern regions (particularly on agriculture and public water supply) and sector-specific impacts in central and northern regions (e.g., on forestry or energy production). The protocol developed thus enabled a new and more comprehensive view on drought impacts across Europe. Related studies have already developed statistical techniques to evaluate the link between drought indices and the categorized impacts using EDII data. The EDII is a living database and is a promising source for further research on drought impacts, vulnerabilities, and risks across Europe. A key result is the extensive variety of impacts found across Europe and its documentation. This insight can therefore inform drought policy planning at national to international levels.

Strain-softening of concrete in uniaxial compression

Abstract: 0025-5432/97 © RILEM tory cast its own specimens following a prescribed recipe The pre-peak behaviour was found to be independent of specimen slenderness when low friction loading platens were used However, for all loading systems a strong increase of (post-peak) ductility was found with decreasing specimen slenderness Analysis of the results, and comparison with data from literature, showed that irrespective of the loading system used, a perfect localization of deformations occured in the post-peak regime, which was first recognised by Van Mier in a series of uniaxial compression tests on concrete between brushes in 1984 Based on the results of the Round Robin, a draft recommendation will be made for a test procedure to measure strain softening of concrete under uniaxial compression Although the post-peak stress-strain behaviour seems to be a mixture of material and structural behaviour, it appears that a test on either prismatic or cylindrical specimens of slenderness h/d = 2, loaded between low friction boundaries (for example by inserting sheets of tef lon between the steel loading platen and the specimen), yields reproducible results with relatively low scatter For normal strength concrete, the closed-loop test can be controlled by using the axial platen-to-platen deformation as a feed-back signal, whereas for high-strength concrete either a combination of axial and lateral deformation should be used, or a combination of axial deformation and axial load FOREWORD An extensive Round Robin test programme on compressive softening was carried out by the RILEM Technical Committee 148-SSC “Test methods for the Strain Softening response of Concrete” The goal was to develop a reliable standard test method for measuring strain softening of concrete under uniaxial compression The main variables in the test programme were the specimen slenderness h/d and the boundary restraint caused by the loading platen used in the experiments Both high friction and low friction loading systems were applied Besides these main variables, which are both related to the experimental environment under which softening is measured, two different concretes were tested: a normal strength concrete of approximately 45 MPa and a higher strength concrete of approximately 75 MPa In addition to the prescribed test variables, due to individual initiatives, the Round Robin also provided information on the effect of specimen shape and size The experiments revealed that under low boundary friction a constant compressive strength is measured irrespective of the specimen slenderness For high friction loading systems (plain steel loading platen), an increase of specimen strength is found with decreasing slenderness However, for slenderness greater than 2 (and up to 4), a constant strength was measured The shape of the stress-strain curves was very consistent, in spite of the fact that each laboraRILEM TC 148-SSC: TEST METHODS FOR THE STRAIN-SOFTENING RESPONSE OF CONCRETE