Project Goals (Abstracts 97-99): Microbial biofuel (i.e. hydrogen and butanol) production holds great promise as a source of renewable clean energy. A critical step towards more efficient biofuel production is improved understanding of the regulation of biofuel-related metabolism and the development of models that are sufficiently accurate to enable rational control of the network behavior. Wit...

Biofuel cells have been widely used to generate bioelectricity. Early biofuel cells employ a semi-permeable membrane to separate the anodic and cathodic compartments. The impact of different membrane materials and compositions has also been explored. Some membrane materials are employed strictly as membrane separators, while some have gained significant attention in the immobilization of enzyme...

High-throughput microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) were used to perform treatability studies on many different refinery wastewater samples all having appreciably different characteristics, which resulted in large differences in current generation. A de-oiled refinery wastewater sample from one site (DOW1) produced the best results, with 2.1±0.2 A/m(2) (maximum current density), 79% chemical ox...

This paper analyses the economics of biofuel production and the implications that the accelerating growth in biofuel production in many countries could have on agricultural markets. It shows that production costs of ethanol and biodiesel differ significantly across countries and feedstock crops. These costs often exceed those of fossil fuels. In consequence, the economics of biofuel production ...

One of the key goals of enzymatic biofuel cells research has been the development of a fully enzymatic biofuel cell that operates under a continuous flow-through regime. Here, we present our work on achieving this task. Two NAD(+)-dependent dehydrogenase enzymes; malate dehydrogenase (MDH) and alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) were independently coupled with poly-methylene green (poly-MG) catalyst fo...

This work addresses the large-scale crude oil scheduling problem of China’s SINOPEC Maoming refinery importing various types of crude oil from two terminals via long-distance pipelines. A hierarchical decomposition approach is employed to construct a two-stage MILP model of the practical refinery operations. In the upper level model, storage and charging tanks are aggregated to determine the in...

This paper discusses the application of control loop performance assessment (Desborough and Harris, 1992) in a refinery setting. In a large process it is not feasible to tailor the parameters of the algorithm to every individual control loop. A procedure is illustrated for selecting default values which make it possible to implement the technology on a refinery-wide scale. For instance, it is s...

This paper presents a novel decomposition strategy for solving large scale refinery scheduling problems. Instead of formulating one huge and unsolvable MILP or MINLP for centralized problem, we propose a general decomposition scheme that generates smaller sub-systems that canbe solved toglobal optimality. The original problem is decomposed at intermediate storage tanks such that inlet and outle...

Browsing is a fundamental aspect of exploratory information-seeking. Associative browsing represents a common and intuitive set of exploratory strategies in which users step iteratively from familiar to novel bits of information. In this paper, we examine associative browsing as a strategy for bottom-up exploration of large, heterogeneous networks. We present Refinery, an interactive visualizat...

Biofuels are a new priority in efforts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels; nevertheless, the rapid increase in production of biofuel feedstock may threaten biodiversity. There are general principles that should be used in developing guidelines for certifying biodiversity-friendly biofuels. First, biofuel feedstocks should be grown with environmentally safe and biodiversity-friendly agricultur...