BACKGROUND In order to generate biofuels, insoluble cellulosic substrates are pretreated and subsequently hydrolyzed with cellulases. One way to pretreat cellulose in a safe and environmentally friendly manner is to apply, under mild conditions, non-hydrolyzing proteins such as swollenin - naturally produced in low yields by the fungus Trichoderma reesei. To yield sufficient swollenin for indus...

The aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility of utilizing the fruiting bodies of a jelly macro-fungus Auricularia polytricha as adsorbents to remove emulsified oil from water. The effects of several factors, including temperature, initial pH, agitation speed, and adsorbent dosage, were taken into account. Results showed that the optimized conditions for adsorption of A. polytricha w...

Surface modification of polyethersulfone (PES) membrane surfaces using UV lozone pretreatment with sub­ sequent grafting and interfacial polymerization on membrane surface was investigated in order to improve the resistance of membrane surface to protein adsorption. The surface modifications were evaluated in terms of hydrophilicity, chemical composition of the surface and static protein adsorp...

The Biosorption property of S. cerevisiae for chromium uptake was investigated in an immobilized cell bioreactor. Saw dust was utilized as the solid bed in the reactor. Adsorption of S. cerevisiae on saw dust obeys a first order reaction kinetic up to 6 hours. The immobilized biomass particles are porous and exist in the new generation of biological adsorbent. Chromium biosorption was studied i...

The monitoring and controlling of environmental pollutions are very important in biological and industrial processes, and a great interest is growing with the development of suitable gas–sensitive materials and hazardous chemical removal devices. In this work, the highly parameterized, empirical exchange–correlation functional M06–2X were employed to investigate the electronic sensitivity of pe...

Surface roughness and energy significantly influence protein adsorption on to biomaterials, which, in turn, controls select cellular adhesion to determine the success and longevity of an implant. To understand these relationships at a fundamental level, a model was originally proposed by Khang et al to correlate nanoscale surface properties (specifically, nanoscale roughness and energy) to prot...

We used a combination of experiments and molecular simulations to investigate at the molecular level the effects of zeolite structure on the adsorption and diffusion of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide as well as separation processes of their mixtures. Our study involved different zeolite topologies and revealed numerous structure-property trends depending on the temperature a...

First principles calculations were carried out for investigation the novel 7-hydroxycoumarinyl gallates derivatives in gas and liquid phases using density functional theory (DFT) method. Computational chemistry simulations were carried out to compare calculated quantum chemical parameters for gallates derivatives. All calculations were performed using DMol3 code which is based on DFT. The Doubl...

Effective thermal conductivity is an important thermophysical property in the design of metal-organic framework-5 (MOF-5)-based hydrogen storage tanks. A modified thermal conductivity model is built by coupling a theoretical model with the grand canonical Monte Carlo simulation (GCMC) to predict the effect of the H2 adsorption process on the effective thermal conductivity of a MOF-5 powder bed ...