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a b s t r a c tSolid biofuels lead towards the replacement of fossil fuels. The olive industry offers potential for biomass production because of the waste generated in olive groves and olive oil industries. Fines and pulp are two substantial components of the olive stone with negative characteristics for combustion processes. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to develop an analytical method to separate olive pulp contained in an olive stone sample and to quantify it at laboratory scale. Thus, fines and pulp have been characterized. Knowing their physicochemical properties, a new separation methodology has been tested to quantify these fractions. Then, a feasibility study of Near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy in combination with multivariate data analysis has been implemented to check if olive pulp content fraction could be controlled by using this fast technique. On the one hand, the new methodology based on differences in density of the impurities has achieved excellent results. On the other hand, the feasibility study of NIR spectroscopy applied to this analysis has been performed with good results. R 2 of 0.867 for olive stone fraction and 0.908 for olive pulp fraction respectively show the possibility of using this technique as routine analysis.

ABSTRACT. New photoelectric photometry and new times of maximum light are reported for the 8 Scuti-type star VZ Cancri. Times of maximum light available for the last five decades have been studied. The times of maximum from the last decade, however, indicate that the period has not been steadily increasing as believed until now. To allow for this discrepancy several interpretations of the O-C diagram are discussed. However, the scatter in the (O-C) residuals is large and it is difficult to favor a case between a sloping linear fit and a sinusoidal fit. The former indicates that the main period needs to be revised and a predicted value of 0.17836365 days is obtained. The later suggests the presence of an unseen companion whose nature and implications are briefly discussed. In either case it can be concluded that VZ Cnc is not undergoing any secular period variation. Other possibilities like abrupt period changes and long-term effects of nonlinear combinations of short frequencies are discussed but found unrealistic.

all rights reserved animal by-product meal, such as meat and bone meal (MBM), are one of the most valuable protein resources for the compound feed industry. the lifting of some bans concerning the use of MBM in livestock production feeds 1-3 would help feed compound manufacturers to bear the increase in the price of high protein oil meal seeds, caused, in part, by the increase in the market demand for biodiesel production. However, the MBM bans will not be lifted until governments and legislative authorities can be assured that the use of MBM in the food chain is without risk. therefore, the rendering industry and its main customers, pet food industries, have a great concern for the implementation of new analytical methods that ensure traceability, safety and customer demands, allowing a more informative label. Meat and bone meal (MBM) is the dried and rendered product from mammalian tissues and contains bones, viscera, lean tissue and fat. Because of the heterogeneous nature of sources of MBM and the variation in rendering procedures, the chemical composition of MBM may vary widely. representative sampling for chemical and in vivo evaluation of MBM is crucial. 4 nIr technology is now already implemented in many rendering and pet food industries around the world

S Set stars are among the most promising targets to perform ground-based asteroseismology. High resolution spectroscopy offers us a powerful technique to identify radial and nonradial pulsation modes, since we can easily detect oscillations and travelling features in the line profiles.The developments of many studies, both observational and theoretical, are proving that the presence of a rich mixture of simultaneously excited radial and nonradial p modes is quite common among 8 Set stars. In the recent years our group has focussed observations on a few stars already observed in the past, in particular FG Vir, BV Cir, X Cae and BB Phe. We devoted six campaigns to them, collecting 1065 spectrograms in 295 observing hours; in some cases we also performed simultaneous photometric measurements. Each star has been observed in two different campaigns, so that it has been possible to make a comparison between two independent datasets, and then check for possible variations in the pulsational content. Most of the detected modes have been independently found in both datasets, and there is also evidence of variations in the mode excitations. We observed several prograde modes, together with a few axisymmetric and retrograde ones. In Fig. 1 a selected sample of modes detected in different stars is shown. They ). The plots show the behaviour of the phase of each mode across the line profile: a phase decreasing with wavelength (i.e. from left to right) indicates a prograde mode (i.e. a negative m order). For each mode we give the observed frequency and the proposed identification (degree £ and azimuthal order m).