Arrowhead compliant virtual market of energy

© 2014 IEEE. Industrial processes use energy to transform raw materials and intermediate goods into final products. Many efforts have been done on the minimization of energy costs in industrial plants. Apart from working on 'how' an industrial process is implemented, it is possible to reduce the energy costs by focusing on 'when' it is performed. Although, some manufacturing plants (e.g. refining or petrochemical plants) can be inflexible with respect to time due to interdependencies in processes that must be respected for performance and safety reasons, there are other industrial segments, such as alumina plants or discrete manufacturing, with more degrees of flexibility. These manufacturing plants can consider a more flexible scheduling of the most energy-intensive processes in response to dynamic prices and overall condition of the electricity market. In this scenario, requests for energy can be encoded by means of a formal structure called flex-offers, then aggregated (joining several flex-offers into a bigger one) and sent to the market, scheduled, disaggregated and transformed into consumption plans, and eventually, into production schedules for given industrial plant. In this paper, we describe the flex-offer concept and how it can be applied to industrial and home automation scenarios. The architecture proposed in this paper aims to be adaptable to multiples scenarios (industrial, home and building automation, etc.), thus providing the foundations for different concept implementations using multiple technologies or supporting various kinds of devices

Primary liver cells cultured on carbon nanotube substrates for liver tissue engineering and drug discovery applications

Here, we explore the use of two- and three-dimensional scaffolds of multiwalled-carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) for hepatocyte cell culture. Our objective is to study the use of these scaffolds in liver tissue engineering and drug discovery. In our experiments, primary rat hepatocytes, the parenchymal (main functional) cell type in the liver, were cultured on aligned nanogrooved MWNT sheets, MWNT yarns, or standard 2-dimensional culture conditions as a control. We find comparable cell viability between all three culture conditions but enhanced production of the hepatocytespecific marker albumin for cells cultured on MWNTs. The basal activity of two clinically relevant cytochrome P450 enzymes, CYP1A2 and CYP3A4, are similar on all substrates, but we find enhanced induction of CYP1A2 for cells on the MWNT sheets. Our data thus supports the use of these substrates for applications including tissue engineering and enhancing liver-specific functions, as well as in in vitro model systems with enhanced predictive capability in drug discovery and development