The conditions for increased production of thermostable -amylase from Bacillus caldolyticus DSM 405 were investigated. Preliminary experiments in batch shake flasks led to an optimized initial cultivation medium. Shake flask experiments in extended-batch and in fed-batch mode of operation indicated that the -amylase production was enhanced by continuous feeding of starch. The activity of the -a...

Fed-batch culture is often used in industry, and dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration control is important in fermentation process control. DO control is often applied by using feedback (FB) control strategy. But, feedforward-feedback (FFFB) control has the advantage in dealing with the time-varying characteristics resulting from cell growth during the fermentation process. Mathematical modeling...

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is an environmental assessment tool that quantifies the environmental impact associated with a product or a process (e.g., water consumption, energy requirements, and solid waste generation). While LCA is a standard approach in many commercial industries, its application has not been exploited widely in the bioprocessing sector. To contribute toward the design of mor...

Heat generation is a very conspicuous phenomenon in large scale bioreactors and could in principle quite easily be measured by the temperature increase of the cooling water. Taking yeast cultures growing on a mixed oxido-reductive metabolism for various reasons as an example, this paper demonstrates how heat dissipation measurements may be used in combination with one other on-line measurement ...

The current study evaluates the performance of a pilot scale fed batch reactor (FBR), fo llowed by coagulation and sand filtration, for the treatment of an oil refinery wastewater. The total reductions in COD, BOD, oil contents and phenol were 95.11%, 94.30%, 99.47% and 100%, respectively, with FBR followed by coagulation and sand filtration. This FBR-coagulation-sand filtration treatment syste...

With the remarkable increase of genomic sequence data of microorganisms, novel tools are needed for comprehensive analyses of the big sequence data available. The self-organizing map (SOM) is an effective tool for clustering and visualizing high-dimensional data, such as oligonucleotide composition on one map. By modifying the conventional SOM, we developed batch-learning SOM (BLSOM), which all...

Antibacterial nanocomposite polyester (PET) fibres were melt spun by adding nano ZnO loaded Linear Low Density Polyethylene (LLDPE) master batch (MB) to the PET chips. The influence of content of nano ZnO on the antibacterial properties, crystallization behaviour and mechanical properties was studied. It was found that PET composite fibres having 1 % nano ZnO showed the optimum antibacterial ac...

Considers the problem of reconstructing a continuous-tone (contone) image from its halftoned version, where the halftoning process is done by error diffusion. The authors present an iterative nonlinear decoding algorithm for halftone-to-contone conversion and show simulation results that compare the performance of the algorithm to that of conventional linear low-pass filtering. They find that t...

Structural properties of stochastic dynamic programs are essential to understanding the nature of the solutions and in deriving appropriate approximation techniques. This is especially important in the case of multidimensional Markov decision processes where the state space, action space or outcome space are large and optimal solutions become computationally intractable. We concentrate on a cla...