Consequences, Opportunities and Challenges of Modern Biotechnology for Europe - The Analysis Report

Biotechnology is generally considered one of the key technologies of the 21st century, with a potentially wide range of applications in e.g. healthcare, agriculture, and industrial production processes. However, this notion has not yet been substantiated, as the diversity of sectors in which biotechnology is applied makes it difficult to investigate its actual degree of diffusion. Against this background and following a request from the European Parliament, the European Commission initiated the Biotechnology for Europe Study (Bio4EU Study). The study's objectives are to assess the contributions of modern biotechnology to the achievement of major European policy goals, and to increase public awareness and understanding of modern biotechnology.This report presents an analysis of the collected data with a view to assessing the contributions of modern biotechnology to major EU policy goals such as economic growth and job creation (Lisbon Agenda), and environmental sustainability and public health (Sustainable Development Strategy). As such, the report can be considered a background document of the Bio4EU synthesis report, which sets out the main findings of the study.JRC.J.5-Agriculture and Life Sciences in the Econom

AI-based Diagnostics for Fault Detection and Isolation in Process Equipment Service

Recent industry requires efficient fault discovering and isolation solutions in process equipment service. This problem is a real-world problem of typically ill-defined systems, hard to model, with large-scale solution spaces. Design of precise models is impractical, too expensive, or often non-existent. Support service of equipment requires generating models that can analyze the equipment data, interpreting the past behavior and predicting the future one. These problems pose a challenge to traditional modeling techniques and represent a great opportunity for the application of AI-based methodologies, which enable us to deal with imprecise, uncertain data and incomplete domain knowledge typically encountered in real-world applications. In this paper the state of the art, theoretical background of conventional and AI-based techniques in support of service tasks and illustration of some applications to process equipment service on bio-ethanol production process are shortly described

Spatial-Intelligent Decision Support System for Sustainable Downstream Palm Oil Based Agroindustry within the Supply Chain Network: A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research

Oil palm plantations as one of the sexiest commodities; produce a high yield of oil and fat that can be used in various sectors. The prospect of oil palm and its derivative products is good, but there are obstacles and problems faced that are mainly related to sustainability issues in oil palm plantations and its downstream process. Therefore, it is important to study the decision-making process that are needed to develop sustainable palm oil agroindustry. This paper aims at providing a comprehensive literature review for decision support system for sustainable agroindustry. Totally, 186 scientific publication articles from 2005 to 2019 were reviewed and synthesized. The reviewed articles were categorize based on the keywords of palm oil sustainability, geographic information system (GIS), and decision support system (DSS). The research gap and pointers for future research that are identified is the lack of sustainability aspect inclusion on decision-making process. We also identified the lack discussion of integrated spatial and intelligent tools through DSS for better, faster, and smarter decision-making process. In the end part of the paper, a pointer for possible future research was develop in terms of combination through spatial-intelligent system applying business analytics for sustainable agroindustry

Development of monitoring and control systems for biotechnological processes

The field of biotechnology represents an important research area that has gained increasing success in recent times. Characterized by the involvement of biological organisms in manufacturing processes, its areas of application are broad and include the pharmaceuticals, agri-food, energy, and even waste treatment. The implication of living microorganisms represents the common element in all bioprocesses. Cell cultivations is undoubtedly the key step that requires maintaining environmental conditions in precise and defined ranges, having a significant impact on the process yield and thus on the desired product quality. The apparatus in which this process occurs is the bioreactor. Unfortunately, monitoring and controlling these processes can be a challenging task because of the complexity of the cell growth phenomenon and the limited number of variables can be monitored in real-time. The thesis presented here focuses on the monitoring and control of biotechnological processes, more specifically in the production of bioethanol by fermentation of sugars using yeasts. The study conducted addresses several issues related to the monitoring and control of the bioreactor, in which the fermentation takes place. First, the topic concerning the lack of proper sensors capable of providing online measurements of key variables (biomass, substrate, product) is investigated. For this purpose, nonlinear estimation techniques are analyzed to reconstruct unmeasurable states. In particular, the geometric observer approach is applied to select the best estimation structure and then a comparison with the extended Kalman filter is reported. Both estimators proposed demonstrate good estimation capabilities as input model parameters vary. Guaranteeing the achievement of the desired ethanol composition is the main goal of bioreactor control. To this end, different control strategies, evaluated for three different scenarios, are analzyed. The results show that the MIMO system, together with an estimator for ethanol composition, ensure the compliance with product quality. After analyzing these difficulties through numeric simulations, this research work shifts to testing a specific biotechnological process such as manufacturing bioethanol from brewery’s spent grain (BSG) as renewable waste biomass. Both acid pre-treatment, which is necessary to release sugars, and fermentation are optimized. Results show that a glucose yield of 18.12 per 100 g of dried biomass is obtained when the pre-treatment step is performed under optimized conditions (0.37 M H2SO4, 10% S-L ratio). Regarding the fermentation, T=25°C, pH=4.5, and inoculum volume equal to 12.25% v/v are selected as the best condition, at which an ethanol yield of 82.67% evaluated with respect to theoretical one is obtained. As a final step, the use of Raman spectroscopy combined with chemometric techniques such as Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis is evaluated to develop an online sensor for fermentation process monitoring. The results show that the biomass type involved significantly affects the acquired spectra, making them noisy and difficult to interpret. This represents a nontrivial limitation of the applied methodology, for which more experimental data and more robust statistical techniques could be helpful

Renewable Energy Resource Assessment and Forecasting

In recent years, several projects and studies have been launched towards the development and use of new methodologies, in order to assess, monitor, and support clean forms of energy. Accurate estimation of the available energy potential is of primary importance, but is not always easy to achieve. The present Special Issue on ‘Renewable Energy Resource Assessment and Forecasting’ aims to provide a holistic approach to the above issues, by presenting multidisciplinary methodologies and tools that are able to support research projects and meet today’s technical, socio-economic, and decision-making needs. In particular, research papers, reviews, and case studies on the following subjects are presented: wind, wave and solar energy; biofuels; resource assessment of combined renewable energy forms; numerical models for renewable energy forecasting; integrated forecasted systems; energy for buildings; sustainable development; resource analysis tools and statistical models; extreme value analysis and forecasting for renewable energy resources

Applications and Experiences of Quality Control

The rich palette of topics set out in this book provides a sufficiently broad overview of the developments in the field of quality control. By providing detailed information on various aspects of quality control, this book can serve as a basis for starting interdisciplinary cooperation, which has increasingly become an integral part of scientific and applied research

A Review of Resonant Converter Control Techniques and The Performances

paper first discusses each control technique and then gives experimental results and/or performance to highlights their merits. The resonant converter used as a case study is not specified to just single topology instead it used few topologies such as series-parallel resonant converter (SPRC), LCC resonant converter and parallel resonant converter (PRC). On the other hand, the control techniques presented in this paper are self-sustained phase shift modulation (SSPSM) control, self-oscillating power factor control, magnetic control and the H-∞ robust control technique

A Review of Resonant Converter Control Techniques and The Performances

paper first discusses each control technique and then gives experimental results and/or performance to highlights their merits. The resonant converter used as a case study is not specified to just single topology instead it used few topologies such as series-parallel resonant converter (SPRC), LCC resonant converter and parallel resonant converter (PRC). On the other hand, the control techniques presented in this paper are self-sustained phase shift modulation (SSPSM) control, self-oscillating power factor control, magnetic control and the H-∞ robust control technique

OBSERVER-BASED-CONTROLLER FOR INVERTED PENDULUM MODEL

This paper presents a state space control technique for inverted pendulum system. The system is a common classical control problem that has been widely used to test multiple control algorithms because of its nonlinear and unstable behavior. Full state feedback based on pole placement and optimal control is applied to the inverted pendulum system to achieve desired design specification which are 4 seconds settling time and 5% overshoot. The simulation and optimization of the full state feedback controller based on pole placement and optimal control techniques as well as the performance comparison between these techniques is described comprehensively. The comparison is made to choose the most suitable technique for the system that have the best trade-off between settling time and overshoot. Besides that, the observer design is analyzed to see the effect of pole location and noise present in the system