Monitoring of metabolic profiling and water status of Hayward kiwifruits by nuclear magnetic resonance

The metabolic profiling of kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa, Hayward cultivar) aqueous extracts and the water status of entire kiwifruits were monitored over the season (June-December) using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methodologies. The metabolic profiling of aqueous kiwifruit extracts was investigated by means of high field NMR spectroscopy. A large number of water-soluble metabolites were assigned by means of 1D and 2D NMR experiments. The change in the metabolic profiles monitored over the season allowed the kiwifruit development to be investigated. Specific temporal trends of aminoacids, sugars, organic acids and other metabolites were observed.The water status of kiwifruits was monitored directly on the intact fruit measuring the T₂ spin-spin relaxation time by means of a portable unilateral NMR instrument, fully non-invasive. Again, clear trends of the relaxation time were observed during the monitoring period.The results show that the monitoring of the metabolic profiling and the monitoring of the water status are two complementary means suitable to have a complete view of the investigated fruit.     

A URI 4-Node quadrilateral element by assumed strain

In this paper one-point quadrature ““““assumed strain““““ mixed element formulation based on the Hu-Washizu variational principle is presented. Special care is taken to avoid hourglass modes and volumetric locking as well as shear locking. The assumed strain fields are constructed so that those portions of the fields which lead to volumetric and shear locking phenomena are eliminated by projection, while the implementation of the proposed URI scheme is straightforward to suppress hourglass modes. In order to treat geometric nonlinearities simply and efficiently, a corotational coordinate system is used. Several numerical examples are given to demonstrate the performance of the suggested formulation, including nonlinear static/dynamic mechanical problems.