EvoBot: Towards a Robot-Chemostat for Culturing and Maintaining Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs)

In this paper we present EvoBot, a RepRap open-source 3D-printer modified to operate like a robot for culturing and maintaining Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs). EvoBot is a modular liquid handling robot that has been adapted to host MFCs in its experimental layer, gather data from the MFCs and react on the set thresholds based on a feedback loop. This type of robot-MFC interaction, based on the feedback loop mechanism, will enable us to study further the adaptability and stability of these systems. To date, EvoBot has automated the nurturing process of MFCs with the aim of controlling liquid delivery, which is akin to a chemostat. The chemostat is a well-known microbiology method for culturing bacterial cells under controlled conditions with continuous nutrient supply. EvoBot is perhaps the first pioneering attempt at functionalizing the 3D printing technology by combining it with the chemostat methods. In this paper, we will explore the experiments that EvoBot has carried out so far and how the platform has been optimised over the past two years

Thermal performance of different working fluids in a dual diameter circular heat pipe

In this paper, heat transfer performance of a 40 cm-length circular heat pipe with screen mesh wick is experimentally investigated. This heat pipe is made of copper with two diameters; larger in the evaporator and smaller in the adiabatic and condenser. Three different liquids including water, methanol, and ethanol are separately filled within the heat pipe. Low heat fluxes are applied (up to 2500 W/m2) in the evaporator and constant temperature water bath is used at three levels including 15, 25, and 35 °C in the condenser. Results demonstrate that higher heat transfer coefficients are obtained for water and ethanol in comparison with methanol. Furthermore, increasing heat flux increases the evaporator heat transfer coefficient. For the case of methanol, some degradation in heat transfer coefficient is occurred at high heat fluxes which can be due to the surface dryout effect. Increasing the inclination angle decreases the heat pipe thermal resistance

Effects of yeast hydrolysate supplementation in low-fish meal diets for pikeperch

Plant proteins have been increasingly used as sustainable substitutes for fish meal (FM) in aquafeeds; however, their high inclusion level compromises fish performance. The objective of this study was to examine whether yeast hydrolysate (YH) supplementation can improve the utilisation of high soybean meal (SM) diet and ameliorate its potential deteriorating impacts in pikeperch (Sander lucioperca). A basal diet was formulated using 44% FM, and four additional diets were produced by replacing 30 or 60% of FM with SM with or without the addition of 2% YH (FM, SM30, SM60, SM30 + YH, and SM60 + YH diets). Each diet was fed to three groups of fish (35.3 ± 0.10 g, 150 fish per group) to visual satiety four times daily for 70 days. Fish growth was not impacted by FM replacement level or YH application. However, SM60 group exhibited markedly higher feed conversion ratio and lower survival rate than those fed the FM- and YH-supplemented diets (P < 0.05). The highest and the lowest protein efficiency ratio values were obtained for the SM30 + YH and SM60 groups, respectively. Whole-body lipid content decreased in SM60 and SM60 + YH groups, and muscle lipid decreased in all the replacement groups. Serum triglyceride and glucose concentrations tended to decrease as FM replacement level increased. The highest alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) activities were detected in the SM60 group, and YH addition significantly decreased the AST and LDH activities. Serum lysozyme activity decreased in SM30, SM60 and SM60 + YH groups. Serum myeloperoxidase and antiprotease activities decreased in SM60 group, and YH supplementation improved their activities. No effects of diets were observed on serum antioxidant parameters such as catalase activity and malondialdehyde concentration, and gut morphological indices. Number of goblet cells in midgut decreased by increasing the SM inclusion level and a slight improvement was observed by YH application. These findings suggest that YH supplementation has the potential to support the replacement of up to 60% FM with defatted SM in pikeperch feed without deteriorating growth, feed utilisation, and survival rate. Further, YH incorporation mitigated the damaging impacts of high SM diet on liver function and non-specific immune response

A novel and effective optimization algorithm for global optimization and its engineering applications: Turbulent Flow of Water-based Optimization (TFWO)

© 2020 Elsevier Ltd In this study we present a new and effective grouping optimization algorithm (namely, the Turbulent Flow of Water-based Optimization (TFWO)), inspired from a nature search phenomenon, i.e. whirlpools created in turbulent flow of water, for global real-world optimization problems. In the proposed algorithm, the problem of selecting control parameters is eliminated, the convergence power is increased and the algorithm have a fixed structure. The proposed algorithm is used to find the global solutions of real-parameter benchmark functions with different dimensions. Besides, in order to further investigate the effectiveness of TFWO, it was used to solve various types of nonlinear Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) optimization problems in power systems and Reliability–RedundancyAllocation Optimization (RRAO) for the overspeed protection system of a gas turbine, as two real-world engineering optimization problems. The results of TFWO are compared with other algorithms, which provide evidence for efficient performance with superior solution quality of the proposed TFWO algorithm in solving a great range of real-parameter benchmark and real-world engineering problems. Also, the results prove the competitive performance and robustness of TFWO algorithm compared to other state-of-the-art optimization algorithms in this study. The source codes of the TFWO algorithm are publicly available at https://github.com/ebrahimakbary/TFWO

Production of organic acids in an immobilized cell reactor using Propionibacterium acidi-propionici

Immobilized cell reactor (ICR) was developed as a novel bioreactor to convert hydrolyzed sugars to organic acids. Sugar fermentation by Propionibacterium acid-propionici entraped by calcium alginatewas carried out in continuous mode to produce propionic and acetic acids. In continuous fermentation, more than 90 percent of glucose conversion and 60 percent conversion of xylose were obtained at a retention time of 28 h. The present research has demonstrated that the microorganism preferred glucose as carbon source over other carbon sources. The highest sugar concentration (120 g/L) in the ICR column was successfully converted to propionic acid. The achieved results in ICR with high substrate concentration are promising for scale up operation

Phasor particle swarm optimization: a simple and efficient variant of PSO

© 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature. Particle swarm optimizer is a well-known efficient population and control parameter-based algorithm for global optimization of different problems. This paper focuses on a new and primary sample for PSO, which is named phasor particle swarm optimization (PPSO) and is based on modeling the particle control parameters with a phase angle (θ), inspired from phasor theory in the mathematics. This phase angle (θ) converts PSO algorithm to a self-adaptive, trigonometric, balanced, and nonparametric meta-heuristic algorithm. The performance of PPSO is tested on real-parameter optimization problems including unimodal and multimodal standard test functions and traditional benchmark functions. The optimization results show good and efficient performance of PPSO algorithm in real-parameter global optimization, especially for high-dimensional optimization problems compared with other improved PSO algorithms taken from the literature. The phasor model can be used to expand different types of PSO and other algorithms. The source codes of the PPSO algorithms are publicly available at https://github.com/ebrahimakbary/PPSO