Ammonia inhibition of biohydrogen production was investigated in batch and continuous flow reactors with glucose as a substrate. In batch tests, biohydrogen production rate was highly dependent on pH and ammonia (defined as the sum of NH3 of NH4+ species) concentrations above 2 g N/L. At pH = 6.2, the maximum production decreased from 56 mL/h at 2 g N/L to 16 mL/h at 10 g N/L. At pH = 5.2, prod...

This research examined novel configuration of SBAR in lab-scale for industrial wastewater treatment. To evaluate COD removal efficiency and granules formation of the novel reactor (R1), SBAR system (R2) was operated under similar conditions during the experimental period. R1 and R2 with working volume of 3.6 and 4.5 L were used to cultivate aerobic granules. Both reactors were operated for 4 hr...

Anaerobic sludge from palm oil mill effluent (POME) treatment plant was used as a source of inocula for the conversion of POME into hydrogen. Optimization of temperature and initial pH for biohydrogen production from POME was investigated by response surface methodology. Temperature of 60oC and initial pHof 5.5 was optimized for anaerobic microflora which gave a maximum hydrogen production of 4...

Traditionally polyester production is done in a batch reactor equipped with a separation column for batch distillation. A promising alternative for the intensification of this process is reactive distillation. In this paper, a reactive distillation model is developed for the synthesis of an unsaturated polyester process. The simulation results are compared with the industrial batch reactor outp...

The removal of biological nitrogen from a synthetic wastewater with different ammonium nitrogen concentrations (50 and 100 mgN-NH4/L) by a nitrification and denitrification process using a sequencing batch biofilm reactor (SBBR) with liquid-phase circulation was studied. The system with a total working volume of 4.6 L (3.7 L in the reactor and 0.9 L in the reservoir) treated 2.1 L of synthetic ...

This paper proposes an interval observer for continuous or fed-batch chemical reactors with uncertainties related to both the heat exchange coefficient and the kinetics. The interval observer provides an upper and a lower bound of the state given bounds for the uncertain parameters. The underand over-estimators are state observers for the non-linear reactor model with two positive tuning parame...

A sequential trajectory linearized adaptive model based predictive controller is designed using the DMC algorithm to control the temperature of a batch MMA polymerization process. Using the mechanistic model of the polymerization, a parametric transfer function is derived to relate the reactor temperature to the power of the heaters. Then, a multiple model predictive control approach is taken i...

Assignments based on dynamic simulation of a batch reactor and a semi-batch reactor in which exothermic reactions are conducted, are used to teach students the various aspects of process safety. The students can observe temperature runaway taking place because of incidents, such as overcharging, cooling water failure, pipe blockage and excessive initial heating. They can derive various strategi...

This paper presents a new measurement-based optimization framework for batch processes whereby optimal operation can be achieved via the tracking of active constraints. It is shown that, under mild assumptions and to a first-order approximation, tracking the necessary conditions of optimality is equivalent to tracking active constraints (both during the batch and at the end of the batch). Thus ...