BACKGROUND The initial part of process development involves extensive screening programs to identify optimal biological systems and cultivation conditions. For a successful scale-up, the operation mode on screening and production scale must be as close as possible. To enable screening under fed-batch conditions, the membrane-based fed-batch shake flask was developed. It is a shake flask mounted...

Pulses of oil were added to completely mixed reactors fed with dairy cow manure and food waste, after achieving a stable performance at an organic loading rate of 4.6+/-0.1gCOD/(l(reactor) day), an oily waste effluent from a canned fish processing industry was fed in the form of pulses. The oil concentration rose up to 9, 12, 15 and 18gCOD(oil)/l(reactor,) after the pulse feeding in the reactor...

BACKGROUND Saccharomyces cerevisiae BY4741 is an auxotrophic commonly used strain. In this work it has been used as host for the expression and secretion of human interleukin-1beta (IL1beta), using the cell wall protein Pir4 as fusion partner. To achieve high cell density and, consequently, high product yield, BY4741 [PIR4-IL1beta] was cultured in an aerated fed-batch reactor, using a defined m...

Two laboratory-scale sequencing batch reactors were used to study biological treatment of carbon and nitrogen in a new combined anaerobic-aerobic system. Piggery wastewater was used as a model effluent. The anaerobic reactor, fed with raw wastewater and nitrite/nitrate recycling from the aerobic reactor, carried out denitrification and anaerobic digestion of organic carbon. In the aerobic react...

BACKGROUND Enzymatic hydrolysis, the rate limiting step in the process development for biofuel, is always hampered by its low sugar concentration. High solid enzymatic saccharification could solve this problem but has several other drawbacks such as low rate of reaction. In the present study we have attempted to enhance the concentration of sugars in enzymatic hydrolysate of delignified Prosopi...

In this study, an innovative aerobic/anoxic sludge bed bioreactor with two feeding regimes, continuous-fed (an up-flow sludge bed reactor (USBR)) and batch fed (sequencing batch reactor (SBR)), was evaluated for the treatment of an industrial estate wastewater with low BOD(5)/COD ratio. The process performance in the two regimes was compared. Two numerical independent variables (retention/react...

In monitoring and controlling wastewater treatment processes, on-line information of nutrient dynamics is very important. However, these variables are determined with a significant time delay. Although the final effluent quality can be analyzed after this delay, it is often too late to make proper adjustments. In this paper, a neural network approach, a software sensor, was proposed to overcome...