Mesophilic fermentative hydrogen production from sago starch-processing wastewater using enriched mixed cultures

Biohydrogen (bioH₂) production from starch-containing wastewater is an energy intensive process as it involves thermophilic temperatures for hydrolysis prior to dark fermentation. Here we report a low energy consumption bioH₂ production process with sago starch powder and wastewater at 30 °C using enriched anaerobic mixed cultures. The effect of various inoculum pretreatment methods like heat (80 °C, 2 h), acid (pH 4, 2.5 N HCl, 24 h) and chemical (0.2 g L⁻¹ bromoethanesulphonic acid, 24 h) on bioH₂ production from starch powder (1% w/v) showed highest yield (323.4 mL g⁻¹ starch) in heat-treatment and peak production rate (144.5 mL L⁻¹ h⁻¹) in acid-treatment. Acetate (1.07 g L⁻¹) and butyrate (1.21 g L⁻¹) were major soluble metabolites of heat-treatment. Heat-treated inoculum was used to develop mixed cultures on sago starch (1% w/v) in minimal medium with 0.1% peptone-yeast extract (PY) at initial pH 7 and 30 °C. The effect of sago starch concentration, pH, inoculum size and nutrients (PY and Fe ions) on batch bioH₂ production showed 0.5% substrate, pH 7, 10% inoculum size and 0.1% PY as the best H₂ yielding conditions. Peak H₂ yield and production rate were 412.6 mL g⁻¹ starch and 78.6 mL L⁻¹ h⁻¹, respectively at the optimal conditions. Batch experiment results using sago-processing wastewater under similar conditions showed bioH₂ yield of 126.5 mL g⁻¹ COD and 456 mL g⁻¹ starch. The net energy was calculated to be +2.97 kJ g⁻¹ COD and +0.57 kJ g⁻¹ COD for sago starch powder and wastewater, respectively. Finally, the estimated net energy value of +2.85 × 10¹³ kJ from worldwide sago-processing wastewater production indicates that this wastewater can serve as a promising feedstock for bioH₂ production with low energy input.     

Control of Dynamic Brake Through Heuristic Rule

In this paper, it is shown that the application of a dynamic brake or thyristorcontrolled braking resistor (TCBR) at the generator terminals enhances the power transfer limit over a transmission line greatly. Two types of dynamic brake configuration have been considered here: a 3-phase, bidirectional, fullwave, Y-connected, phase controlled conventional brake and a 3-phase, fullwave, thyristor-controlled rectifier bridge. A simple rule-based '' ON-OFF'' control law based on the local measurement of generator output power and its derivative is proposed in this paper. Detail digital simulation studies using the PSCAD/EMTDC package have been carried out. It was found that with the insertion of the dynamic brake circuit and its associated control, the system is able to recover following 3-line-to-ground faults even at very heavy power transfer levels, which is not possible otherwise.     

Combined Wavelet-SVM Technique for Fault Zone Detection in a Series Compensated Transmission Line

This paper presents a combined wavelet-support vector machine (SVM) technique for fault zone identification in a series compensated transmission line. The proposed method uses the samples of three line currents for one cycle duration to accomplish this task. Initially, the features of the line currents are extracted by first level decomposition of the current samples using discrete wavelet transform (DWT). Subsequently, the extracted features are applied as inputs to a SVM for determining the fault zone (whether the fault is before or after the series capacitor, as observed from the relay point). The feasibility of the proposed algorithm has been tested on a 300-km, 400-kV series compensated transmission line for all the ten types of faults through detailed digital simulation using PSCAD/EMTDC. Upon testing on more than 25000 fault cases with varying fault resistance, fault inception angle, prefault power transfer level, percentage compensation level, and source impedances, the performance of the developed method has been found to be quite promising.     

A self-tuning fuzzy PI controller for TCSC to improve power system stability

In this paper, a self-tuning fuzzy PI controller (STFPIC) is proposed for thyristor-controlled series capacitor (TCSC) to improve power system dynamic performance. In a STFPIC controller, the output-scaling factor is adjusted on-line by an updating factor (α). The value of α is determined from a fuzzy rule-base defined on error (e) and change of error (Δe) of the controlled variable. The proposed self-tuning controller is designed using a very simple control rule-base and the most natural and unbiased membership functions (MFs) (symmetric triangles with equal base and 50% overlap with neighboring MFs). The comparative performances of the proposed STFPIC and the standard fuzzy PI controller (FPIC) have been investigated on two multi-machine power systems (namely, 4 machine, 2 area system and 10 machine 39 bus system) through detailed non-linear simulation studies using MATLAB/SIMULINK. From the simulation studies it has been found out that for damping oscillations, the performance of the proposed STFPIC is better than that obtained by the standard FPIC. Moreover, the proposed STFPIC as well as the FPIC have been found to be quite effective in damping oscillations over a wide range of operating conditions and are quite effective in enhancing the power carrying capability of the power system significantly.     

Incompleteness of bifurcation diagram in predicting the behaviour of Ćuk converter in discontinuous conduction mode

The bifurcation phenomena have been studied in current mode‐controlled ?uk converter considering continuous conduction as well as discontinuous conduction mode of operation. Some peculiarities have been observed in discontinuous conduction mode, which indicate some incompleteness of the bifurcation diagrams in providing details of the system behaviour. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fermentative bioenergy production from distillers grains using mixed microflora

The feasibility of hydrogen production from distillers grains substrate, an industrial cellulosic waste, was investigated. A substrate concentration of 80 g/L gave the maximum production at 50 °C and pH of 6.0 using sewage sludge. Four controllable factors with three levels: seed sludge (two sewage sludges and cow dung), temperature (40, 50, and 60 °C), pH (6, 7 and 8) and seed pretreatment (none, heat, and acid) were selected in Taguchi experimental design to optimize fermentation conditions. The peak hydrogen and ethanol productions were found with heat-treated cow dung seed, substrate concentration 80 g/L, 50 °C and pH 6. The peak hydrogen production rate and hydrogen yield were 7.9 mmol H₂/L/d and 0.40 mmol H₂/g-COD respectively whereas the peak ethanol production was 3050 mg COD/L and rate 0.22 g EtOH/L/d. A total bioenergy yield of 41 J/g substrate was obtained which was 21% and 79% from hydrogen and ethanol respectively.     

Fermentative biohydrogen production from starch-containing textile wastewater

The present study deals with the biohydrogen production from starch-containing wastewater collected from the textile industry in Taiwan. The effects of inoculums collected from different sources (sewage sludge, soil and cow dung), substrate concentrations (5–25 g COD/L) and pH (4.0–8.0) on hydrogen production from wastewater were investigated.     

A Critical Appraisal of Design of Experiments for Uncertainty Quantification

Surrogate models are widely used to predict response function of any system and in quantifying uncertainty associated with the response function. It is required to have response quantities at some preselected sample points to construct a surrogate model which can be processed in two way. Either the surrogate model is constructed using one shot experimental design techniques, or, the sample points can be generated in a sequential manner so that optimum sample points for a specific problem can be obtained. This paper addresses a comprehensive comparisons between these two types of sampling techniques for the construction of more accurate surrogate models. Two most popular one shot sampling strategies: Latin hypercube sampling and Sobol sequence, and four different type sequential experimental designs (SED) namely, Monte Carlo intersite projected (MCIP), Monte Carlo intersite projected threshold (MCIPT), optimizer projected (OP) and LOLA-Voronoi (LV) method are taken for the present study. Two most widely used surrogate models, namely polynomial chaos expansion and Kriging are used to check the applicability of the experimental design techniques. Three different types of numerical problems are solved using the two above-mentioned surrogate models considering all the experimental design techniques independently. Further, all the results are compared with the standard Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). Overall study depicts that SED performs well in predicting the response functions more accurately with an acceptable number of sample points even for high-dimensional problems which maintains the balance between accuracy and efficiency. More specifically, MCIPT and LV method based Kriging outperforms other combinations.     

In Vitro Structural and Functional Evaluation of Gold Nanoparticles Conjugated Antibiotics

Bactericidal efficacy of gold nanoparticles conjugated with ampicillin, streptomycin and kanamycin were evaluated. Gold nanoparticles (Gnps) were conjugated with the antibiotics during the synthesis of nanoparticles utilizing the combined reducing property of antibiotics and sodium borohydride. The conjugation of nanoparticles was confirmed by dynamic light scattering (DLS) and electron microscopic (EM) studies. Such Gnps conjugated antibiotics showed greater bactericidal activity in standard agar well diffusion assay. The minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) values of all the three antibiotics along with their Gnps conjugated forms were determined in three bacterial strains, Escherichia coli DH5α, Micrococcus luteus and Staphylococcus aureus. Among them, streptomycin and kanamycin showed significant reduction in MIC values in their Gnps conjugated form whereas; Gnps conjugated ampicillin showed slight decrement in the MIC value compared to its free form. On the other hand, all of them showed more heat stability in their Gnps conjugated forms. Thus, our findings indicated that Gnps conjugated antibiotics are more efficient and might have significant therapeutic implications. Biswarup Saha and Jaydeep Bhattacharya authors contributed equally.     

Rough Self Organizing Map

A rough self-organizing map (RSOM) with fuzzy discretization of feature space is described here. Discernibility reducts obtained using rough set theory are used to extract domain knowledge in an unsupervised framework. Reducts are then used to determine the initial weights of the network, which are further refined using competitive learning. Superiority of this network in terms of quality of clusters, learning time and representation of data is demonstrated quantitatively through experiments over the conventional SOM.