A simple and non-conventional electrospinning technique was employed for producing highly oriented Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanofibers. The PAN nanofibers were electrospun from 14 wt% solution of PAN in dimethylformamid (DMF) at 11 kv on a rotating drum with various linear speeds from 22.5 m/min to 67.7 m/min. The influence of take up velocity was investigated on the degree of alignment, internal structure and mechanical properties of collected PAN nanofibers. Using an image processing technique, the best degree of alignment was obtained for those nanofibers collected at a take up velocity of 59.5 m/min. Moreover, Raman spectroscopy was used for measuring molecular orientation of PAN nanofibers. Similarly, a maximum chain orientation parameter of 0.25 was determined for nanofibers collected at a take up velocity of 59.5 m/min.

In this paper, direct tracking method as an image analysis based technique for measuring electrospun nanofiber diameter has been presented and compared with distance transform method. Samples with known characteristics generated using a simulation scheme known as µ-randomness were employed to evaluate the accuracy of the method. Electrospun webs of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) were also used to verify the applicability of the method on real samples. Since direct tracking as well as distance transform require binary input images, micrographs of the electrospun webs obtained from Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) were first converted to black and white using local thresholding. Direct tracking resulted in more accurate estimations of fiber diameter for simulated images as well as electrospun webs suggesting the usefulness of the method for electrospun nanofiber diameter measurement.

Microwave (MW) drying is a rapid dehydration technique that can be applied to specific foods. Increasing concerns over product quality and production costs have motivated the researchers to investigate and the industry to adopt microwave drying technology. The advantages of microwave drying include the following: shorter drying time, improved product quality, and flexibility in producing a wide variety of dried products. Drying is influenced by heat and mass transfer between drying airflow and product, as well as the complex moisture transport processes which take place in the product.. This paper presents an analytical approach for the drying of potato. The laws of moisture content change in the food product as a function of mass transfer are used for the theoretical approach. The study gives a brief description of efforts made to obtain basic drying parameters under different microwave drying conditions. This computational method can be used as a tool for microwave drying of potato slabs more efficiency.

In this work, the effects of electrical double layer (EDL) near the solid/ liquid interface, on three dimensional heat transfer characteristic and pressure drop of water flow through a rectangular microchannel numerically are investigated. An additional body force originating from the existence of EDL is considered to modify the conventional Navier-stokes and energy equations. These modified equations are solved numerically for steady laminar flow on the basis of control volume approaches. Fluid velocity distribution and temperature with presence and absence of EDL effects are presented for various geometric cases and different boundary conditions. The results illustrate that, the liquid flow in rectangular microchannels is influenced significantly by the EDL, particularly in the high electric potentials, and hence deviates from flow characteristics described by classical fluid mechanics.