Development of an irradiation equipment to accelerate the degradation of rosé wine in antique green and flint bottles.

Flint bottles make rosé wines more attractive to the customers and, also, allow them to detect oxidation problems in the color of these wines. Nonetheless, transparent bottles do not protect wines from light. In this work, a device capable of accelerating the degradation of rosé wines using W lamps radiation for short times of exposure has been developed. This equipment has been used to accelerate the color photodegradation of rosé wines, allowing, thus, to identify which parameters can be used as markers of such degradation. The irradiation treatment applied to rosé wines bottled in different types of glass (Flint and Antique Green glass) influenced all the samples. However, the wines treated in Flint bottles displayed more important color variations, especially in color intensity (CI) and hue, than the wines treated in Antique Green bottles. These changes entailed a quality loss of rosé wines that can be appreciated with a naked eye. The yellow component of rosé wines treated in transparent bottles increased the detriment of the red and blue ones. Therefore, color parameters such as CI and a*, together with the total anthocyanin content, seem to be good markers of the loss of quality of rosé wines due to the light effects. The next step will be to find a physical, chemical or physical-chemical protection strategy that, when applied to transparent glass, allow to achieve the light-filtering properties of green glass bottles.

Mechanical Performance of AlCrSiN and AlTiSiN Coatings on Inconel and Steel Substrates after Thermal Treatments.

The objective of this study was to explore the mechanical properties of AlCrSiN and AlTiSiN coatings deposited on Inconel and steel substrates after thermal treatments of 500 °C and 800 °C. Nanoindentation was used to measure the hardness and elastic modulus of the coatings, and microindentation was used for observing the contact damage with Hertzian contact loadings. Microscratch and Mercedes tests were used to evaluate the adhesive strength between coating and substrate with both progressive and static loads, respectively. The surface damage was inspected by optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Focus ion beams (FIB) were used to mill the cross-sections in order to detect the extent and mode of failure. The results show that AlCrSiN coatings and Inconel substrates exhibit better mechanical performance, even after thermal treatments.