Catechol is a terminal metabolite formed during the degradative pathways of various aromatic compounds, generally pollutants. Pseudomonas sp. strain NGK1 (NCIM 5120), a soil microbe, is capable of utilizing catechol as the carbon and energy source. This bacterium was encapsulated in alginate and polyurethane foam (PUF). The degradation rate of 20 and 40 mM of catechol in shaken batch cultures, ...

This article follows the authors’ previous works on numerical simulations of biomass drying and devolatilization (Juřena et al., 2009a-b), in which a packed bed of solid fuel particles is treated as a continuous porous medium. The bed model consists of several sub-models describing individual combustion processes. Since packing conditions change markedly during the processes, a proper descripti...

Studies on bench scale reactors packed with two different media matrix – Biopac media and Fugino spirals were undertaken to determine the performance at various organic loading rate (OLR) and on one day hydraulic retention time (HRT). Parboiled rice mill wastewater depicted a COD/BOD ratio of 1.6 indicating good degradable nature of the wastewater. Four different organic loadings of 0.8, 1.6, 2...

The breeder thermal performances under a purge line break have been analyzed for two blanket design options: a blanket design using a packed breeder bed and a blanket design using a sintered breeder product. Under a purge line break open to a vacuum environment, the packed bed breeder temperature exceeds its operating temperature limit at a faster rate than that of the sintered breeder blanket ...

Water pollution from emerging contaminants (ECs) or emerging pollutants is an important environmental problem. Heterogeneous photocatalytic treatment, as advanced oxidation treatment of wastewater effluents, has been proposed to solve this problem. In this paper, a heterogeneous photocatalytic process was studied for emergent contaminants removal using paracetamol as a model contaminant molecul...

Organic pollutants, like phenol, along with heavy metals, like chromium, are present in various industrial effluents that pose serious health hazard to humans. The present study looked at removal of chromium (VI) in presence of phenol in a counter-current continuous packed bed reactor packed with E. coli cells immobilized on clay chips. The cells removed 85% of 500 mg/L of chromium (VI) from MS...

Sodium borohydride (NaBH4) hydrogen storage systems offer many advantages for hydrogen storage applications. The physical processes nside a NaBH4 packed bed reactor involve multi-component and multi-phase flow and multi-mode heat and mass transfer. These processes are lso coupled with reaction kinetics. To guide reactor design and optimization, a reactor model involving all of these processes i...

Glucose, enzymatically released from pulp fiber sludge, was combined with inorganic salts and used as a growth medium for Alcaligenes eutrophus, a gram-negative strain producing poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB). By controlling the concentrations of the inorganic salts in the growth medium, almost 78% of the cell mass was converted to pure PHB. Efforts were made to find conditions for bacterial gro...

Chemical looping combustion is a promising technology for power production with integrated CO2 capture. High overall efficiencies can be reached, if the CLC reactors are operated at elevated pressures and high temperature, which can be accommodated in packed bed reactors. More possible oxygen carriers can be selected if the desired temperature rise for power production is achieved in a two stag...

The preparation and use of Guefoams as heterogeneous catalyst is reported. Guefoam consists an open-pore Al-Si foam that accommodates a freely mobile guest phase (Ni/CeO2/Al2O3 particles) in its cavities, with neither physical nor chemical matrix-guest bond. A eutectic Al-12Si alloy was used low-melting matrix precursor to prevent thermal sintering the active during liquid metal infiltration. C...