A MULTI-SCALE APPROACH TO FED-BATCH BIOREACTOR CONTROL Abhishek Soni , M.S. University of Pittsburgh The rising energy costs, increased global competition in terms of both price and quality, and the need to make products in an environmentally benign manner have paved the way for the biological route towards manufacturing. Many of the products obtained by the biological route either cannot be pr...

Several important properties of poly(3-hydroxybutyric-co-3-hydroxyvaleric acids) (P(3HB-co-3HV) depend mainly on the HV unit fraction of the copolymer. Sequential and simultaneous feeding of glucose and valerate were employed to produce P(3HB-co-3HV) in a fed-batch culture of Ralstonia eutropha, and the effects of feeding models on the cell growth, 3HV unit fraction, and copolymer productivity ...

The production of biodiesel through batch and existing continuous-flow processes requires the use of a much higher excess alcohol, typically 100%, than the stoichiometric molar requirement in order to drive the transesterification reaction to completion. This excess alcohol must be recovered in a separate process, which involves additional capital and operating costs. In this study, a novel rea...

We present the Distributed Batch Controller (DBC), a system built to support batch processing of large scientiic datasets. The DBC implements a federation of autonomous workstation pools, which may be widely-distributed. Individual batch jobs are executed using idle workstations in these pools. Input data are staged to the pool before processing begins. We describe the architecture and implemen...

Alcaligenes latus has been known to produce poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) in a growth-associated manner even under nutrient-sufficient conditions. However, the PHB content obtained by fed-batch culture was always low, at ca. 50%, which makes the recovery process inefficient. In this study, the effect of applying nitrogen limitation on the production of PHB by A. latus was examined. In flask and...

Polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) are persistent pollutants of great concern due to their potential toxicity, mutagenicity and carcinogenicity. A biotechnological approach remove PAH from soil was evaluated in this work using a laccase mediator system. Initially, produced by fungal co-cultivation, kiwi peels as substrate. The applied contaminated evaluate its efficiency on enzymatic bioremediatio...

Microbial desalination cells (MDCs) have  great potential as a cost-effective and green technology for simultaneous water desalination, organic matter removal and energy production. The aim of this study was to compare the performance of a MDC under batch and continuous feeding conditions. Hence, power and current output, coulombic efficiency, electron harvest rate, desalination rate and COD re...

Two upflow anaerobic sludge bed (UASB) reactors were fed with a non-inhibitory substrate sucrose and an inhibitory substrate phenol, respectively, to compare granule characteristics and biokinetics. The average size of biomass granules in the sucrose-fed UASB reactor was slightly larger than that of the phenol-fed reactor. The average microbial density was significantly higher in the phenol-fed...

The chemical composition, hydrolysis products, and kinetics during liquid hot water pretreatment of sweet sorghum bagasse (SSB) and eucalyptus wood chips (EWC) were investigated. Under optimal conditions, a total xylose recovery of 79.6% and 55.6% for SSB and of 74.9% and 84.4% for EWC was achieved after pretreatments in a step-change flow rate reactor (184 °C, 20 ml/min, 8 min, and 10 ml/min, ...

a bench scale aerobic sequencing batch reactor (sbr) was evaluated in terms of its potential to treat synthetic dairy wastewater. the 2-l plexiglass bioreactor was supplied with oxygen via a fine bubble air diffuser, fed with synthetic dairy wastewater under various operational conditions. to analyze the process, three significant independent variables — influent chemical oxygen demand (cod), m...