The cogeneration system of a sugar factory consists of boiler, steam turbine, and sugar juice evaporation process. The multiple-effect evaporator used for the conventional sugar juice evaporation process is the forward-feed multiple-effect evaporator, in which steam and sugar juice flow in the same direction. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the energy efficiency of the backward-feed multiple-effect evaporator, in which steam and sugar juice flow in opposite directions, compared with that of the forward-feed multiple-effect evaporator. Mathematical models are developed for both multiple-effect evaporators, and used to compare the performances of two cogeneration systems that use the forward-feed and backward-feed multiple-effect evaporators. The forward-feed multiple-effect evaporator requires extracted steam from a turbine at one pressure, whereas the backward-feed multiple-effect evaporator requires steam extraction at two pressures. Both evaporators have the same t... [more]

Cheap and plentiful, water was for centuries a manufacturing tool that industry took for granted [...]

The large-scale biomass production is an essential step in the biotechnological applications of microalgae. Coccomyxa onubensis is an acidophilic microalga isolated from the highly acidic waters of Río Tinto (province of Huelva, Spain) and has been shown to accumulate a high concentration of lutein (9.7 mg g−1dw), a valuable antioxidant, when grown at laboratory-scale. A productivity of 0.14 g L−1 d−1 was obtained by growing the microalga under outdoor conditions in an 800 L tubular photobioreactor. The results show a stable biomass production for at least one month and with a lutein content of 10 mg g−1dw, at pH values in the range 2.5−3.0 and temperature in the range 10−25 °C. Culture density, temperature, and CO2 availability in highly acidic medium are rate-limiting conditions for the microalgal growth. These aspects are discussed in this paper in order to improve the outdoor culture conditions for competitive applications of C. onubensis.

Thermodynamic cycles to produce power and cooling simultaneously have been proposed for many years. The Goswami cycle is probably the most known cycle for this purpose; however, its use is still very limited. In the present study, two novel thermodynamic cycles based on the Goswami cycle are presented. The proposed cycles use an additional component to condense a fraction of the working fluid produced in the generator. Three cycles are modeled based on the first and second laws of thermodynamics: Two new cycles and the original Goswami cycle. The results showed that in comparison with the original Goswami cycle, the two proposed models are capable of increasing the cooling effect, but the cycle with flow extraction after the rectifier presented higher irreversibilities decreasing its exergy efficiency. However, the proposed cycle with flow extraction into the turbine was the most efficient, achieving the highest values of the energy utilization factor and the exergy efficiency. It was... [more]

In this study, a typical Grey−Taguchi method has been applied in order to select the optimal configuration of a solar air heater to achieve optimum performance. The analysis is performed for different system configurations in terms of collector type, mass flow rate, and cover type. The Grey−Taguchi method, which requires the minimum possible numbers of the demanded experiments for accomplishing a robust statistical decision for a given experimental problem, has been employed, and temperature difference and thermal performance have been used as the two main criteria. It is found that by considering the temperature difference criterion, at a mass flow rate of 0.011 kg/s, the best configuration is the double-pass solar collector owning a one-fourth pierced Plexiglas cover with a distance of 60 mm between the centers of the holes. On the other hand, by considering the thermal performance as the criterion, the best configuration at a mass flow rate of 0.032 kg/s is found to be the double-pa... [more]

The needs of society are often a driving force for engineering research [...]

Zero-valent iron (ZVI) has been used for water treatment for more than 160 years. However, passivation of its surface often constituted a problem which could only be tackled recently by the innovative Ferrodecont process using a fluidized bed reactor. In this study, pilot scale experiments for the removal of Mo, Cr, W, Cu, Ag and Zn from two industrial waste water samples and lab-scale experiments for the beneficiation of the abrasion products are presented to integrate the Ferrodecont process into a complete recycling process chain. Firstly, 38.5 % of Cu was removed from sample A, yielding abrasion products containing 33.1 wt% Cu as metallic copper (Cu) and various Cu compounds. The treatment of sample B removed 99.8 % of Mo, yielding abrasion products containing 17.8 wt% of Mo as amorphous phases or adsorbed species. Thermal treatment (1300 °C) of the abrasion product A indicated a reduction of delafossite to metallic Cu according to differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), thermogra... [more]

Two pilot-scale tests were carried out to assess if biodrying could be an effective process for the treatment of light fraction produced by an hydromechanical pre-treatment in an anaerobic digestion plant. The trials were performed using two pilot-scale stainless steel cylindrical reactors of 750 L capacity. Two tests were performed: in Test 1, only the light fraction was used; in Test 2, the light fraction was mixed with a bulking agent composed of garden and pruning waste. In Test 2, the highest temperature (71 °C) in a short time (8 days) was reached. An average water content reduction of 78% in Test 1 and 61% in Test 2 was measured, leading to similar reductions of weight (47−48%) and volume (27−29%). A high biological stability was measured on the final light fraction samples collected from both the tests. Furthermore, the lower heating value obtained after the biodrying treatment complies with the quality specification of the European standard on refuse-derived fuels.

In this work, the response surface methodology was used to optimize the process parameters of gallic acid adsorption on magnetic ion exchange (MIEX) resin. Based on Box-Behnken Design, a quadratic polynomial model equation including solution pH, gallic acid concentration, MIEX resin dosage and adsorption time was established. The reliability of the established regression equation was tested by variance analysis. Based on the regression equation, the technical parameters for gallic acid adsorption on MIEX resin were optimized and the effects of interaction between variables on the removal of gallic acid were analyzed. The results showed that the established regression equation was reliable and could effectively predict the removal of gallic acid. The optimal technical parameters were determined to be a pH of 9.17, a gallic acid concentration of 8.07 mg/L, a resin dosage of 0.98 mL/L and an adsorption time of 46.43 min. The removal efficiency of gallic acid was 97.93% under the optimal p... [more]

The stimulation of renewable fuel production is related to the environmental issues resulting from the extraction and utilization of fossil fuels. Although corn-based ethanol is one of the leading renewable fuels and promises to mitigate these environmental impacts, it generates large volumes of wastewater with high concentrations of organic material (CODcr > 30,000 mg/L) and low pH (3.5−4.5), which leads to serious environmental concerns. A common method of treatment of distillery wastewater is the Dry Distilled Grain Soluble (DDGS) process, which separates liquid and solid fractions; however, a disadvantage of this process is its high energy consumption. Other commonly implemented methods are often costly and not environmentally safe. To minimize these problems, a flocculation process can be applied as a potential lower energy consumption process utilizing bioflocculants, which have been proven harmless to the environment. Therefore, the main goal of this study was to analyze the eco... [more]

The application of a cryogenic liquefied natural gas expander can reduce the production of flash steam and improve the efficiency of natural gas liquefaction. Like traditional hydraulic machinery, cavitation will occur during the operation of a liquefied natural gas expander, in particular, there is a strong vortex flow in the draft tube, and the cavitation phenomenon is serious. In this paper, the energy loss coefficient of the draft tube is used to describe the cavitation flow in the draft tube, and the goal of reducing the cavitation in the draft tube is achieved through the optimization design of the runner. Different runner models within the range of design parameters were obtained using the Latin hypercube test, and the relationship between design parameters and objective functions is constructed by a second-order response surface model. Finally, the optimized runners were obtained using a genetic algorithm. The effects of blade loading distribution and blade lean angles on the c... [more]

Waste heat recovery plays an important role in energy source management. Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) can be used to recover low-temperature waste heat. In the present work a sample power plant waste heat was used to operate an ORC. First, two pure working fluids were selected based on their merits. Four possible thermodynamic models were considered in the analysis. They were defined based on where the condenser and evaporator temperatures are located. Four main thermal parameters, evaporator temperature, condenser temperature, degree of superheat and pinch point temperature difference were taken as key parameters. Levelized energy cost values and exergy efficiency were calculated as the optimization criteria. To optimize exergy and economic aspects of the system, Strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm II (SPEA II) was implemented. The Pareto frontier solutions were ordered and chose by TOPSIS. Model 3 outperformed all other models. After evaluating exergy efficiency by mixture mass fra... [more]

Pinene is a secondary plant metabolite that has functional properties as a flavor additive as well as potential cognitive health benefits. Although pinene is present in low concentrations in several plants, it is possible to engineer microorganisms to produce pinene. However, feedstock cost is currently limiting the industrial scale-up of microbial pinene production. One potential solution is to leverage waste streams such as whey permeate as an alternative to expensive feedstocks. Whey permeate is a sterile-filtered dairy effluent that contains 4.5% weight/weight lactose, and it must be processed or disposed of due its high biochemical oxygen demand, often at significant cost to the producer. Approximately 180 million m3 of whey is produced annually in the U.S., and only half of this quantity receives additional processing for the recovery of lactose. Given that organisms such as recombinant Escherichia coli grow on untreated whey permeate, there is an opportunity for dairy producers... [more]

The term biolubricant applies to all lubricants that are easily biodegradable and non-toxic to humans and the environment. The uses of biolubricant are still very limited when compared to those of mineral oils, although this trend is increasing and depends on investment in research and development (R&D). The increase in demand for biodegradable lubricants is related to the evolution of environmental regulations, with more restrictive rules being implemented to minimize environmental impact caused by inappropriate disposal. This study provides an overview of the types, production routes, properties, and applications of biolubricants. Biolubricants are classified as either natural or synthetic oils according to chemical composition. Natural oils are of animal or vegetable origin and are rarely used because they are unstable at high temperatures and form compounds that are harmful to equipment and machines. Synthetic oils are obtained from chemical reactions and are the best lubricants fo... [more]

The trends and challenges of pyrolysis technology nowadays have shifted to low-temperature pyrolysis, which provides low-cost processes but high-yield conversion, with suitable H2/CO ratios for performing gas-to-liquid technology in the future. The present study has developed a modified vacuum pyrolysis reactor to convert sugarcane bagasse to gas products, including H2, CO2, CH4, and CO in the low-temperature process. The experimental design includes the effects of pyrolysis time, pyrolysis temperature, and applying a current as a function of the electromagnetic field. The result showed that 0.12 ng/µL, 0.85 ng/µL, and 0.31 ng/µL of hydrogen (H2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and carbon monoxide (CO) gases, respectively, started forming in the first 20 min at 210 °C for the pyrolysis temperature, and the gas product accumulated in the increase of pyrolysis time and temperature. In the absence of electromagnetic field, the optimum condition was obtained at 60 min and 290 °C of pyrolysis time a... [more]

Alkaline water electrolysis is a key technology for large-scale hydrogen production powered by renewable energy. As conventional electrolyzers are designed for operation at fixed process conditions, the implementation of fluctuating and highly intermittent renewable energy is challenging. This contribution shows the recent state of system descriptions for alkaline water electrolysis and renewable energies, such as solar and wind power. Each component of a hydrogen energy system needs to be optimized to increase the operation time and system efficiency. Only in this way can hydrogen produced by electrolysis processes be competitive with the conventional path based on fossil energy sources. Conventional alkaline water electrolyzers show a limited part-load range due to an increased gas impurity at low power availability. As explosive mixtures of hydrogen and oxygen must be prevented, a safety shutdown is performed when reaching specific gas contamination. Furthermore, the cell voltage sh... [more]

This study aims to reduce the amount of specific energy consumed during the drying of fresh Murraya koenigii leaves by comparing four drying methods: (1) convective hot-air drying (CD; 40, 50 and 60 °C); (2) single-stage microwave-vacuum drying (MVD; 6, 9 and 12 W/g); (3) two-stage convective hot-air pre-drying followed by microwave-vacuum finishing−drying (CPD-MVFD; 50 °C, 9 W/g); and (4) freeze-drying as a control in the analysis sections. The drying kinetics were also modelled using thin-layer models. The quality parameters of dried M. koenigii leaves were measured including total polyphenolic content (TPC), antioxidant capacity (ABTS and FRAP), profiling of volatile compounds, colour analysis and water activity analysis. Results showed that CPD-MVFD effectively reduced the specific energy consumption of CD at 50 °C by 67.3% in terms of kilojoules per gram of fresh weight and 48.9% in terms of kilojoules per gram of water. The modified Page model demonstrated excellent fitting to th... [more]

Technoeconomic analyses using established tools such as SuperPro Designer® require a level of detail that is typically unavailable at the early stage of process evaluation. To facilitate this, members of our group previously created a spreadsheet-based process modeling and technoeconomic platform explicitly aimed at joint fermentative‒catalytic biorefinery processes. In this work, we detail the reorganization and expansion of this model—ESTEA2 (Early State Technoeconomic Analysis, version 2), including detailed design and cost calculations for new unit operations. Furthermore, we describe ESTEA2 validation using ethanol and sorbic acid process. The results were compared with estimates from the literature, SuperPro Designer® (Version 8.5, Intelligen Inc., Scotch Plains, NJ, 2013), and other third-party process models. ESTEA2 can perform a technoeconomic analysis for a joint fermentative‒catalytic process with just 12 user-supplied inputs, which, when modeled in SuperPro Designer®, requi... [more]

The 20th century has witnessed a remarkable enhancement in the demand for varieties of consumer products, ranging from food, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, to other industries. To enhance the quality of the product and to reduce the production cost, industries are gradually inclined towards greener processing technologies. Cavitation-based technologies are gaining interest among processing technologies due to their cost effectiveness in operation, minimization of toxic solvent usage, and ability to obtain superior processed products compared to conventional methods. Also, following the recent advancements, cavitation technology with large-scale processing applicability is only denoted to the hydrodynamic cavitation (HC)-based method. This review includes a general overview of hydrodynamic cavitation-based processing technologies and a detailed discussion regarding the process effectiveness. HC has demonstrated its usefulness in food processing, extraction of valuable products, biofuel synt... [more]

Olive mill wastewater (OMW) presents high environmental impact due to the fact of its elevated organic load and toxicity, especially in Mediterranean countries. Its valorization for simultaneous pollutants degradation and green energy production is receiving great attention, mainly via steam reforming for hydrogen generation. Following previous works, the present research goes into detail about OMW valorization, particularly investigating for the first time the potential benefits of OMW−bioethanol mixtures co-reforming for ultra-pure hydrogen production in Pd-membrane reactors. In this manner, the typical large dilution of OMW and, hence, excess water can be used as a reactant for obtaining additional hydrogen from ethanol. Fresh OMW was previously conditioned by filtration and distillation processes, analyzing later the effect of pressure (1−5 bar), oxidizing conditions (N2 or air as carrier gas), gas hourly space velocity (150−1500 h−1), and alcohol concentration on the co-reforming... [more]

Waste heat recovery of the internal combustion engine (ICE) has attracted much attention, and the supercritical carbon dioxide (S-CO2) cycle was considered as a promising technology. In this paper, a comparison of four S-CO2 cycles for waste heat recovery from the ICE was presented. Improving the exhaust heat recovery ratio and cycle thermal efficiency were significant to the net output power. A discussion about four different cycles with different design parameters was conducted, along with a thermodynamic performance. The results showed that choosing an appropriate inlet pressure of the compressor could achieve the maximum exhaust heat recovery ratio, and the pressure increased with the rising of the turbine inlet pressure and compressor inlet temperature. The maximum exhaust heat recovery ratio for recuperation and pre-compression of the S-CO2 cycle were achieved at 7.65 Mpa and 5.8 MPa, respectively. For the split-flow recompression cycle, thermal efficiency first increased with th... [more]

Compression−absorption cascade refrigeration system (CACRS) is the extension of absorption refrigeration system, which can be utilized to recover excess heat of heat exchanger networks (HENs) and compensate refrigeration demand. In this work, a stage-wise superstructure is presented to integrate the generation and evaporation processes of CACRS within HEN, where the generator is driven by hot process streams, and the evaporation processes provide cooling energy to HEN. Considering that the operating condition of CACRS has significant effect on the coefficient of performance (COP) of CACRS and so do the structure of HEN, CACRS and HEN are considered as a whole system in this study, where the operating condition and performance of CACRS and the structure of HEN are optimized simultaneously. The quantitative relationship between COP and operating variables of CACRS is determined by process simulation and data fitting. To accomplish the optimal design purpose, a mixed integer non-linear pr... [more]

Recently, studies about smoked food tend to identify harmful compounds that potentially appear within the smoking process. The process, conducted in a smokehouse, closely corresponds with the design and method. This paper presents a smokehouse designed by integrating a biomass furnace, a heat exchanger, a cyclone separator, and a smoking chamber. The design target was to obtain a smoking system that produces clean smoked fish. The design and construction phase and the performance tests phase are discussed in this paper. The energy source used was coconut shells, fed into the furnace at predetermined amounts, to achieve the desired temperature. The performance tests were done using skipjack fish, whose weight ranged from 0.7−1.0 kg/head. The results showed that the smoking system was able to complete the smoking process of the fish in 13 h with 20.1% moisture reduction. The temperature of the smoking chamber varied from 70 °C to 108 °C and the internal fish temperature during the cookin... [more]

Activated carbon (AC) has been extensively utilized as an adsorbent over the past few decades. AC has widespread applications, including the removal of different contaminants from water and wastewater, and it is also being used in capacitors, battery electrodes, catalytic supports, and gas storage materials because of its specific characteristics e.g., high surface area with electrical properties. The production of AC from naturally occurring precursors (e.g., coal, biomass, coconut shell, sugarcane bagasse, and so on) is highly interesting in terms of the material applications in chemistry; however, recently much focus has been placed on the use of agricultural wastes (e.g., rice husk) to produce AC. Rice husk (RH) is an abundant as well as cheap material which can be converted into AC for various applications. Various pollutants such as textile dyes, organic contaminants, inorganic anions, pesticides, and heavy metals can be effectively removed by RH-derived AC. In addition, RH-deriv... [more]

In this study, oxidizing roasting, segregation roasting, and magnetic separation are used to extract cobalt and iron from refractory Co-bearing sulfur concentrate. The Co-bearing sulfur concentrate containing 0.68% Co, 33.26% Fe, and 36.58% S was obtained from V-Ti magnetite in the Panxi area of China by flotation. Cobalt pyrite and linneite were the Co-bearing minerals, and the gangue minerals were mica, chlorite, feldspar, and calcite in Co-bearing sulfur concentrate. The results show that cobalt is transformed from Co-pyrite and linneite to a Co2FeO4-dominated new cobalt mineral phase, and iron is transformed from pyrite to Fe2O3 and an Fe3O4-dominated new iron mineral phase after oxidizing roasting. Cobalt changed from CoFe2O4 to a new cobalt mineral phase dominated by [Co] Fe solid solution, and iron changed from Fe2O3 to a new iron mineral phase dominated by metal Fe and Fe3O4 after segregation roasting. Cobalt concentrate with a cobalt grade of 15.15%, iron content of 71.22%, an... [more]