28,783 research outputs found
Heterotrophy as a tool to overcome the long and costly autotrophic scale-up process for large scale production of microalgae
Industrial scale-up of microalgal cultures is often a protracted step prone to culture collapse and the occurrence of unwanted contaminants. To solve this problem, a two-stage scale-up process was developed - heterotrophically Chlorella vulgaris cells grown in fermenters (1st stage) were used to directly inoculate an outdoor industrial autotrophic microalgal production unit (2nd stage). A preliminary pilot-scale trial revealed that C. vulgaris cells grown heterotrophically adapted readily to outdoor autotrophic growth conditions (1-m3 photobioreactors) without any measurable difference as compared to conventional autotrophic inocula. Biomass concentration of 174.5 g L-1, the highest value ever reported for this microalga, was achieved in a 5-L fermenter during scale-up using the heterotrophic route. Inocula grown in 0.2- and 5-m3 industrial fermenters with mean productivity of 27.54 ± 5.07 and 31.86 ± 2.87 g L-1 d-1, respectively, were later used to seed several outdoor 100-m3 tubular photobioreactors. Overall, all photobioreactor cultures seeded from the heterotrophic route reached standard protein and chlorophyll contents of 52.18 ± 1.30% of DW and 23.98 ± 1.57 mg g-1 DW, respectively. In addition to providing reproducible, high-quality inocula, this two-stage approach led to a 5-fold and 12-fold decrease in scale-up time and occupancy area used for industrial scale-up, respectively.Agência financiadora
project FERMALG
017608
Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT)
UID/Multi/04326/2019
project FERMALG (AVISO)
32/SI/2015info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
The Dyer-Roeder relation in a universe with particle production
We have obtained analytical exact solutions of the Dyer-Roeder equation in a
cosmological model where creation of particles occurs at the expenses of the
gravitational field. We discussed the influences of inhomogeneities in the path
of a light beam on the apparent diameter of astrophysical objects and consider
both redshift independent as redshift dependent distributions of the
inhomogeneities.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures. Accepted to be published in the Astronomy and
Astrophysics Journa
Palindromic 3-stage splitting integrators, a roadmap
The implementation of multi-stage splitting integrators is essentially the
same as the implementation of the familiar Strang/Verlet method. Therefore
multi-stage formulas may be easily incorporated into software that now uses the
Strang/Verlet integrator. We study in detail the two-parameter family of
palindromic, three-stage splitting formulas and identify choices of parameters
that may outperform the Strang/Verlet method. One of these choices leads to a
method of effective order four suitable to integrate in time some partial
differential equations. Other choices may be seen as perturbations of the
Strang method that increase efficiency in molecular dynamics simulations and in
Hybrid Monte Carlo sampling.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, 2 table
Towards the lattice study of M-theory
We propose the Wilson discretization of the supersymmetric Yang-Mills Quantum
Mechanics as a lattice version of the matrix model of M-theory. An SU(2) model
is studied numerically in the quenched approximation for D=4. A clear signal
for the existence of two different phases is found and the continuum
pseudocritical temperature is determined. We have also extracted the continuum
limit of the total size of the system in both phases and for different
temperatures.Comment: Lattice 2000 (Gravity and Matrix Models
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