Biography:

Gema Sevilla Toboso has her expertise in improving the environment. Her evaluation based on agro-food industry waste from Castilla-La Mancha creates new ways to produce hydrogen and thus improve the environment through the generation of a fuel that does not produce greenhouse gases while treating this waste. Her investigation is carried out in CNH2, a National Research Centre at the service of the entire Scientific, Technology and Industrial Community. 

Abstract:

Increasing demand for energy, depletion of primary energy sources (i.e., coal and oil) and environmental degradation have made the production of energy from alternative nonconventional sources essential. In the same way, recent trends in food production have led to an increase in the generation of wastes during food processing, that needs further management to avoid environmental problems. Therefore, hydrogen produced from renewable sources could play an important role for future energy economy as clean, CO2 neutral and environmentally friendly energy carrier. Hydrogen is easily used in fuel cells for electricity production, whose high energy yield of 122 kJ g− 1, which is 2.75 times greater than known hydrocarbon fuels, allows its use as a fuel for transportation. In addition, it can be stored not only chemically but also physiochemically in various solid and liquid composites. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide-ranging variety of primary energy sources and different production technologies. However, currently most of it is produced by Steam Reforming from nonrenewable feedstock, producing high greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, fermentative hydrogen production can utilize renewable carbohydrate-based substrates, such as waste biomass from agricultural sectors. Furthermore, this process occurs at lower temperatures and pressures, and is therefore less energy-intensive than chemical and electrochemical processes. So, abundant biomass from various industries could be a sustainable source for biohydrogen (hydrogen produced by living organisms) where combination of waste treatment and energy production would be an advantage. In this work different types of agro-food industry waste from Castilla- La Mancha (dairy wastes, beer lees, winery waste and mushroom waste) have been studied in order to determine the substrate with the highest biohydrogen production by dark fermentation. For this purpose, different experiments have been carried out with the aim of quantify certain characteristics of substrates, like carbohydrate content and trace elements, that influence in the H2 yield. 

Biography:

A V Bailey PhD and D.Sc., (Chemistry) is a Principal Lecturer in the School of Chemistry and Materials Science of RIT, USA actively teaching undergraduate courses ranging from General & Analytical Chemistry through ‘Clean energy” courses including three online courses, which she designed. She holds forty patents and have authored over 80 scientific publications, including four books. As a member of clean energy team, she developed and taught a new lecture and lab courses clean energy: hydrogen/fuel cells based on the written textbooks. She has advised undergraduate students doing research in the field of polymer membranes for fuel cells. As a PI of five exelon constellation company grants education program about electricity generation using fuel cells 2015 -2019, she conducts training sessions to NY State High School Teachers. She was nominated for the outstanding teaching award for RIT Non-Tenure-Track Faculty and for the Provost's Innovative Teaching with Technology Award. 

Abstract:

Biography:

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev & Azrieli College of Engineering • Chemical Engineering & Pharmaceutical Engineering.

Abstract:

It is difficult to represent the behavior of a photosynthetic culture by simple kinetic expressions. This is specially so when the dynamic behavior of the cultures has to be considered, because of the interaction of fluid dynamics with photosynthesis. All of the mathematical models of photosynthesis available in the literature are based on the lumping of a large amount of biochemical reactions into simpler steps or into hypothetical concepts, which aim at representing the behavior of the actual biochemical apparatus. The selection of a model is, thus, the result of the compromise between the ‘loyalties to biology’, that is, to the elements of the biochemical steps that are quite known in the photosynthetic process, and the computational burden resulting of a complex mathematical formulation. Photosynthetic cells change the rate of biomass synthesis as the irradiance that they perceive changes. Because of this, data are collected usually after keeping the culture at a constant irradiance during considerable time. During this time, the cells adequate its photosynthetic elements to those conditions and this is detected as a change not only in production rate, but also in the cell composition, mainly as chlorophyll a (Chla) concentration change. This is called photo acclimation or photoadaptation.  The minimal requirement for the design of a PBR is the P–I curve, that is, the dependence of the photosynthesis rate on irradiance, with easily measurable parameters usually called α, the initial photosynthesis rate, and Pm, the maximal photosynthesis rate, at certain irradiance Is. Thus, the parameters of the curve, in spite of being empirically determined, can be associated to the growth process and to the behavior of the culture, which depend on its physiological state. P is usually given in terms of biomass produced per unit time and unit volume (or mass) of the culture, or per unit illuminated surface. The basic  approach is valid only for a photo acclimated system, that is, a system that has been kept for sufficient time at each of the irradiances. If the P–I curve is the simplest way of representing the kinetics of photosynthesis, on the other end of the range there is a group of much more sophisticated models that can be called physiological, aiming at the representation of the dynamic behavior of photosynthetic cells, and proposing approximations to the mechanism operating inside the cells which depends on their capacity of adaptation to different illumination intensities. Those models try to express the dynamics of a photosynthetic culture taking into account a considerable amount of variables in addition of the obvious (carbon source and light), and among them various substrates that algae require for growth, as nitrate and phosphate, and also intracellular concentrations of Chla, the extent of light-damaged protein D1 in photosystem II (PSII), nitrogen and carbon content in the cell, etc. The goal of those advanced models is representing mathematically the actual physiology of the photosynthetic cells. An expectable drawback in this type of models is the large amount of parameters that have to be adjusted. There is still another group of models of photosynthesis that can be situated between the previous two extremes. Those are the models using the concept of photosynthetic unit (PSU), also called photosynthetic factories (PSUs).2,4,45– 52 These models are especially instrumental in representing the dynamics of the photobioreactors, because they do not aim at describing the physiology of the cell but the behavior of the algal culture. The main variable considered is the light intensity, which is usually the limiting substrate in dense cultures as those focused for industrial production. It is assumed that all the other substrates are provided at sufficient rate and being in excess do not need to be taken as variables. The engineering aspects of the addition of those nutrients to the bioreactor are simply based on stoichiometry. There is a wide range of devices that have been used for the modeling of PBRs. Many of those devices are the result of ingenious invention and empirical trial & error processes. Only a small part of those have been developed via modelling and using adequate kinetic representations of the biomass growth. The poster will review critically those systems.

Biography:

Abstract:

Biography:

S A Archer is a PhD candidate, studying for a Doctorate in Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and their Applications, whilst working with the Resource Recovery from Wastes programme (RRfW). Her knowledge and skills involve the application of life cycle thinking and environmental impact assessments to produce liquid and gaseous fuel products from biomass and waste residues in addition to biorefined neo-catalysts from resources recovered from waste streams. Her work aims to conduct an LCA on the catalytic upgrading of both heavy fossil oil and pyrolysis oils from dry biomass, comparing commercial and biocatalysts. The environmental impact for each pathway will be identified within a ‘well to gate’ (cradle to gate) system boundary, alongside an additional fuel use analysis separate from the LCA. 

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Biography:

Jai Hyun Park is a PhD candidate in Gyeongsang National University, South Korea. His studies are in growing media for growing various plants. He is interested in biomass and bio-ethanol production. 

Abstract:

Many road slopes have been created along with many road works. Since these road slopes have problems of landslides and soil erosion, there are many studies on road slope greening. However, it is difficult to grow plants on a general slope. Generally, growing medium is used to replace soil for plant growth and in recent years, many studies have been conducted to produce the growing medium using various materials such as agricultural byproducts and sewage sludge. Since, the study on the road slope greening to use this growing medium is quite limited, we produce the growing media using woody biomass and apply the prepared growing media to the preliminary slope to determine the germination of Lotus corniculatus. The growing media was prepared by mixing woody biomass, peat, perlite and sodium nitrate. Soil was used as a control. Soil, soil and growing media mixture (1:1, w/w) and growing media were applied to slope to observe physical and chemical properties and germination of Lotus corniculatus. As a result, physical properties (moisture content, bulk density and porosity) were improved by using growing media to compare soil for plant growth. Among the chemical properties, the organic matter, available phosphate and CEC were also higher in the using growing media than soil. However, the germination of Lotus corniculatus was the highest in the mixture of soil and growing media followed by the higher in the soil. The lowest germination was in the growing media. In conclusion, when the results of physical and chemical properties and germination, it was confirmed that the mixture of soil and the growing media was most suitable for plant growth on the slope. 

Biography:

Si Young Ha is student and PhD candidate of Gyeongsang National University in South Korea. She had retained a keen interest in applied and various fields of biomass. In particular, she has been studying the chemistry of woody biomass and their efficacy in treatment of vitiligo or atopic for a long time. She also has experience in poster presentation in the symposium on biotechnology for fuels and chemicals (2016) and bioenergy conference (2017

Abstract:

More recently, Cordyceps militaris has been widely used due to its folkloric activities, which are not based on scientific studies. Cordycepin (3′-deoxyadenosine), a metabolite of C. militaris, has been showed to inhibit the growth of various tumor cells. Previous work reported the isolation of cordycepin from liquid culture medium of C. militaris and its pharmacological functions. But, as far as we know, there is limited knowledge about the light emitting diode (LED) condition for cordycepin production by C. militaris. In this paper, the effects of LED were focused in order to improve the cordycepin production by submerged cultivation of C. militaris. For this experiment, mycelial cultivation was performed in a shaking incubator at 24°C, 100 RPM for 5 days and the medium was sabouraud dextrose broth (pH 5.6). The red, green and blue were used for the LED and dark culture and fluorescent lamp were used as the control. This results, C. militaris showed the highest mycelial weight when green light was irradiated on the other hand, when irradiated with blue light, the content of cordycepin is about 4 times higher than that of fluorescent lamp in the cultures of C. militaris. In addition, the highest content of cordycepin was observed when irradiated for 6 h/day for 3 days. Interestingly, mycelial weight and cordycepin content were inversely related. The information obtained is considered fundamental and useful to the development of C. militaris cultivation process for efficient production of cordycepin on a large scale.