Healthcare Professionals’ Perceptions and Concerns towards Domestic Violence during Pregnancy in Southern Italy

Background: Literature on pregnancy highlighted a large number of women abused by their partners, especially among low-income teenagers attending hospital for pregnancy check-ups. Pregnancy represents a key moment for diagnosing domestic violence. Method: This study explores health professionals’ perceptions and concerns about domestic violence against women in services dealing with pregnant women. The twenty-four interviewees were from an Obstetrical-Gynecological walk-in Clinic in the south of Italy. The textual data has been complementarily analyzed by means of two dierent procedures: Symbolic-structural semiotic analysis and Thematic content analysis. Results: What emerges is that the interviewees of the clinic do not regard the issue of domestic violence as a matter of direct interest for the health service. The clinic is seen as a place for urgent contact, but one where there is not enough time to dedicate to this kind of patient, nor an adequate space to care for and listen to them. Obstetricians and health personnel expressed a negative attitude when it comes to including questions regarding violence and abuse in pre-natal reports. Training for health and social professionals and the empowering of institutional support and networking practices are needed to increase awareness of the phenomenon among the gynecological personnel

Butanol production by clostridium acetobutylicum in a series of packed biofilm bed reactors

The reactor design plays a key role in the fermentative production of biobutanol. The high cell concentration that may be reached in confined – biofilm, membrane, recycling - cell reactors offers high conversion rates. To the authors knowledge, the concentration of solvents in the broth from biofilm reactors reported in literature is not particularly high and it negatively affects the successive stages for butanol recovery. The low concentration of solvents in the produced stream is typically due to the inhibitory effect of solvents on the fermentation. Therefore, the butanol bioreactor productivity is as low as the bioreactor behaviour approaches the CSTR limit. The aim of this contribution is to report recent results on the design of a continuous biofilm reactor to optimize the process performances. Clostridium acetobutylicum DSM 792 was adopted for the fermentation process. The conversion was carried out in 4 packed bed reactors (PBRs) connected in series: the first reactor of the series was kept under acidogenesis and the successive reactors were kept under solventogenesis. Tests were carried out feeding the reactor system with solutions bearing glucose. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Special Issue on “Bioreactor System: Design, Modeling and Continuous Production Process”

Biochemical engineering deals with the processing of biological or chemical materials using enzymes or living cells as biological catalysts. At a central position in a biotechnolog- ical process is the bioreactor. The term bioreactor refers to a device, or system that contains substrates and enzymes or cells as biocatalysts and provides an environment in which the biocatalysts can perform their functions. The characteristics of enzyme biocatalysts resemble more or less those of chemical catalysts in that their activities degrade with time, whereas cells are self-multiplying living systems. Both types of biocatalysts have undergone successful developments in producing various product

Processes for biobutanol production from renewable resources

The impact of petroleum fuel emissions and more rapid diminishing petroleum reserves have increased the research for alternative biofuel sources. In this scenario, recently is rising the biorefinery concept. A biorefinery is a facility that produces fuels, power, heat, and value-added chemicals from biomass conversion. The study carried out during the present Ph.D. program aimed at investigating the butanol production process by fermentation from renewable resources. The activities, in order to pursue the biorefinery concept, were articulated according to three paths :i)Feedstock market and techno-economic feasibility assessment of butanol production; ii)Biomass Pretreatment; iii)Butanol production and characterization of the ABE fermentation process. These studies were carried out at the "Enco" Engineering Consulting Company, at the "University of Western Ontario" Canada and at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica, dei Materiali e della Produzione Industriale of the University of Naples 'Federico II'. Waste to energy: feedstocks market assessment The cost of the substrate represents about 60% of the overall production cost for a fermentation process. For this reason, feedstock available at high mass rate, with a constant availability over the year and low cost is a key issue for the success of the butanol production. A survey of potential "waste biomass" for butanol production was proposes. The maximum butanol production rate from each biomass has been estimated taking into account the feedstock availability rate, the average composition and the butanol yield. Furthermore, a study aiming at investigating the techno-economic feasibility of butanol production from lignocellulosic biomass was carried out. A potential flowsheet to produce butanol by conversion of a lignocellulosic biomass has been simulated by means of the software Aspen Plus®. The production process has been splitted into three sections: the upstream section, the fermentation section, and the butanol recovery section. Particular attention has been paid to the upstream process. The upstream units have been analysed according the approximated cost-estimation methods integrated with the simulation software Aspen Plus®. Biomass Pretreatment A new class of solvents DES (Deep Eutectic Solvent) has been investigated to obtain fermentable sugars from corncob. Corncob, a byproduct of corn grain production, is currently being used as a potential feedstock for cellulosic ethanol production in the United States, as it has a low lignin and high carbohydrate contents. DESs exhibit similar physico-chemical properties to ionic liquids, but they are environmentally friendlier and much cheaper. The pretretated corncob was characterized in term of lignin content, inhibitors concentration, crystallinity index and enzymatic digestibility. Butanol production and characterization of the ABE fermentation process The study was aimed at the assessment of the butanol production by C. acetobutylicum. Xylose and lactose are used as carbon source. Xylose is one of the mains components of the lignocellulose hydrolysates, lactose is used to mime cheese-whey, a wastewater stream released from the cheese industry. In order to optimize a continuous biofilm reactor, which is characterized by a heterogeneous cell population, the kinetics of acidogenic and solventogenic cells are investigated. Acids production by acidogenic cells and butanol production by solventogenic cells were investigated using different reactor configurations: CSTR under controlled pH and CSTR with microfiltration unit respectively. Operating conditions of the continuous tests were selected to maximize the butanol production and butanol selectivity

Special Issue on “Bioreactor System: Design, Modeling and Continuous Production Process”

Biochemical engineering deals with the processing of biological or chemical materials using enzymes or living cells as biological catalysts [...

Non-Thermal Plasma as a Biomass Pretreatment in Biorefining Processes

Climatic changes and the growing population call for innovative solutions that are able to produce biochemicals by adopting environmentally sustainable procedures. The biorefinery concept meets this requirement. However, one of the main drawbacks of biorefineries is represented by the feedstocks’ pretreatment. Lately, scientific research has focused on non-thermal plasma, which is an innovative and sustainable pretreatment that is able to obtain a high sugar concentration. In the present review, literature related to the use of non-thermal plasma for the production of fermentable sugar have been collected. In particular, its sugar extraction, time, and energy consumption have been compared with those of traditional biomass pretreatments. As reported, on one hand, this emerging technology is characterized by low costs and no waste production; on the other hand, the reactor’s configuration must be optimized to reduce time and energy demand

Non-Thermal Plasma as a Biomass Pretreatment in Biorefining Processes

Climatic changes and the growing population call for innovative solutions that are able to produce biochemicals by adopting environmentally sustainable procedures. The biorefinery concept meets this requirement. However, one of the main drawbacks of biorefineries is represented by the feedstocks’ pretreatment. Lately, scientific research has focused on non-thermal plasma, which is an innovative and sustainable pretreatment that is able to obtain a high sugar concentration. In the present review, literature related to the use of non-thermal plasma for the production of fermentable sugar have been collected. In particular, its sugar extraction, time, and energy consumption have been compared with those of traditional biomass pretreatments. As reported, on one hand, this emerging technology is characterized by low costs and no waste production; on the other hand, the reactor’s configuration must be optimized to reduce time and energy demand

Pretreatment of coffee silverskin with ultrasound and mild alkaline solutions for enhancement of sugar yield

The increasing global energy requirement is shifting the scientific attention from fossil to bio-based resources to produce energy and chemicals. Lignocellulose is the most abundant natural and renewable resource on Earth. A considerable amount of such material is generated as waste through agricultural practices mainly from various agro-industries. Agriculture food processing wastes (AFWs) are potential feedstock for biorefinery processes being economic and eco-friendly. Coffee silverskin (CSS) is anAFWsproduced during the coffee beans roasting process. These vegetable residues are recalcitrant to enzymatic and microbial attacks, limiting their use for biorefinery applications. Pretreatment delignification methods are required to facilitate the enzymatic hydrolysis of AFWs aimed at the recovery of monomeric fermentable sugars from these residues. The aim of this study was to develop a pretreatment process by using ultrasound and mild alkaline solutions for the effective separation of lignin and cellulose to improve the sugar yield from CSS. The effects of sonication time, biomass loading, sodium hydroxide concentration and residence time in autoclave, were studied using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). A maximum reducing sugar yield of 0.6 gsugar/gtotal sugar in pretreated biomass was obtained with 5min sonication, 11% w/v biomass loading, 5% w/v NaOH and 75 min autoclave. Analysis of liquid after pretreatment revealed that fermentation inhibitors like furfural, HMF, ferulic and p-coumaric acid were absent or present in non-toxic concentrations for various Clostridium sp. Moreover, a phenolic content of 25.3 mgGAE/graw CSS was found. Changes of biomass structural properties after pretreatment were highlighted by SEM and XRD analysis

Kinetic Characterization of Enzymatic Hydrolysis of Apple Pomace as Feedstock for a Sugar-Based Biorefinery

The enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose from biomass feedstock in the sugar-based biorefinery chain is penalized by enzyme cost and difficulty to approach the theoretical maximum cellulose conversion degree. As a consequence, the process is currently investigated to identify the best operating conditions with reference to each biomass feedstock. The present work reports an investigation regarding the enzymatic hydrolysis of apple pomace (AP). AP is an agro-food waste largely available in Europe that might be exploited as a sugar source for biorefinery purposes. A biomass pre-treatment step was required before the enzymatic hydrolysis to make available polysaccharides chains to the biocatalyst. The AP samples were pre-treated through alkaline (NaOH), acid (HCl), and enzymatic (laccase) delignification processes to investigate the effect of lignin content and polysaccharides composition on enzymatic hydrolysis. Enzymatic hydrolysis tests were carried out using a commercial cocktail (Cellic®CTec2) of cellulolytic enzymes. The effect of mixing speed and biomass concentration on the experimental overall glucose production rate was assessed. The characterization of the glucose production rate by the assessment of pseudo-homogeneous kinetic models was proposed. Data were analysed to assess kinetic parameters of pseudo-mechanistic models able to describe the glucose production rate during AP enzymatic hydrolysis. In particular, pseudo-homogeneous Michaelis and Menten, as well as Chrastil’s models were used. The effect of lignin content on the enzymatic hydrolysis rate was evaluated. Chrastil’s model provided the best description of the glucose production rate