The immiscibility of vegetable oil in methanol provides a mass transfer challenge in the early stages of Transesterification reaction in the production of biodiesel. It is of a great significance to design high-performance nonlinear controllers for efficient control of these nonlinear processes to achieve closed-loop system’s stability and high performance of a biodiesel CSTR. A mathematical mo...

The effect of recirculation in increasing organic loading rate (OLR) and decreasing hydraulic retention time (HRT) in a semi-continuous two-stage anaerobic digestion system using stirred tank reactor (CSTR) and an upflow anaerobic sludge bed (UASB) was evaluated. Two-parallel processes were in operation for 100 days, one with recirculation (closed system) and the other without recirculation (op...

The start-up strategies for thermophilic anaerobic reactors usually consist of an initial mesophilic stage (35°C), with an approximate duration of 185 days, and a subsequent thermophilic stage (55°C), which normally requires around 60 days to achieve the system stabilizatio. During the first 8-10 days of the mesophilic stage, the reactor is not fed so that the inoculum, which is generally a mes...

Kalman Filter (KF) is widely used in process industries as state estimator to diagnose the faults either in the sensor, actuator or in the plant because of its recursive nature. But, due to increase in non-linearity and exogenous perturbations in the monitored plant, it is often difficult to use a simple KF as state estimator for nonlinear process monitoring purposes. Thus, the first objective ...

In the primary motor cortex (M1), layer 5 projection neurons signal directly to distant motor structures to drive movement. Despite their pivotal position and acknowledged diversity these neurons are traditionally separated into broad commissural and corticofugal types, and until now no attempt has been made at resolving the basis for their diversity. We therefore probed the electrophysiologica...

In this paper, the thermodynamic availability function is used as a Lyapunov function for the practical derivation of non linear control laws for the stabilization of a large class of CSTRs far from the equilibrium. The strict convexity of the availability function is guaranteed as long as one of the extensive variables is fixed. In this study, we consider liquid mixture with constant volume, t...

We consider the numerical time integration of a class of reaction–transport systems that are described by a set of ordinary differential equations for primary variables. In the governing equations, the terms involved may require the knowledge of secondary variables, which are functions of the primary variables. Specifically, we consider the case where, given the primary variables, the evaluatio...

The effect of two additives on anaerobic monodigestion of pig slaughterhouse waste was studied in three laboratory scale continuously stirred tank reactors (CSTRs) operated for 242-284 days at 35°C. A higher organic loading rate (OLR), namely 2.25 kg volatile solids (VS)/m(3)d with a hydraulic retention time (HRT) of 30 d was feasible with an additive containing Fe, HCl and trace elements while...