Improving the Efficiency of a Nuclear Power Plant Using a Thermoelectric Cogeneration System

The efficiencies of nuclear power plants are rather poor having the ratio %30 by using the conventional energy/exergy tools. According to that information, large amount of energy is wasted during condensation and thrown out to the environment. Thermoelectric generator (TEG) system has a potential to be used as a heat exchanging technology to produce power with a relatively low efficiency (about 5%) and it can transform the temperature difference into electricity and generate clean electrical energy. In the present study, we offer a novel system to recover the waste heat from a VVER-1000 nuclear power plant. The heat transfer of the TEG is analyzed numerically with respect to the various temperature ranges and constant mass flow rate of the exhaust steam entering the system. In the analyses, different hot temperature ranges (35ºC, 45ºC and 55ºC) and a constant cold temperature (i.e. 18ºC) are used for a HZ-20 thermoelectric module and it has been proven that the designed TEG can produce the maximum output power of 76,956 MW for a temperature difference ∆T=37 and the conversion efficiency of 3.854% sits. The TEG is designed for the condenser of a 1000 MW nuclear power plant. It\u27s shown that about 2.0% increasing in the power plant efficiency is expected by using the selected thermoelectric generator in the condensation cycle.Article History: Received: July 15th 2017; Received: October 17th 2017; Accepted: February 13rd 2018; Available onlineHow to Cite This Article: Terzi, R. and Kurt, E. (2018), Improving the efficiency of a nuclear power plant using a thermoelectric cogeneration system, Int. Journal of Renewable Energy Development, 7(1), 77-84.https://doi.org/10.14710/ijred.7.1.77-8

Failure of Sterne- and Pasteur-Like Strains of Bacillus anthracis to Replicate and Survive in the Urban Bluebottle Blow Fly Calliphora vicina under Laboratory Conditions

Britta von Terzi, Peter C. B. Turnbull, Wolfgang Beyer, University of Hohenheim, Institute of Environmental and Animal Hygiene, Stuttgart, GermanySteve E. Bellan, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States of AmericaThis study aimed to elucidate the bacteriological events occurring within the gut of Calliphora vicina, selected as the European representative of blow flies held responsible for the spread of anthrax during epidemics in certain parts of the world. Green-fluorescent-protein-carrying derivatives of Bacillus anthracis were used. These lacked either one of the virulence plasmids pXO1 and pXO2 and were infected, or not infected, with a worm intestine phage (Wip4) known to influence the phenotype and survival of the pathogen. Blood meals were prepared for the flies by inoculation of sheep blood with germinated and, in case of pXO2+ strains, encapsulated cells of the four B. anthracis strains. After being fed for 4 h an initial 10 flies were externally disinfected with peracetic acid to ensure subsequent quantitation representing ingested B. anthracis only. Following neutralization, they were crushed in sterile saline. Over each of the ensuing 7 to 10 days, 10 flies were removed and processed the same way. In the absence of Wip4, strains showed steady declines to undetectable in the total B. anthracis counts, within 7–9 days. With the phage infected strains, the falls in viable counts were significantly more rapid than in their uninfected counterparts. Spores were detectable in flies for longer periods than vegetative bacteria. In line with the findings in both biting and non-biting flies of early workers our results indicate that B. anthracis does not multiply in the guts of blow flies and survival is limited to a matter of days.This work was funded by grant BE 2157/3-1 of the German Research Foundation (DFG). SEB was funded by a United States National Institute of General Medical Sciences MIDAS grant U01GM087719 to Lauren A. Meyers and Alison P. Galvani. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Center for Computational Biology and BioinformaticsEmail: [email protected]

Selection of cellulolytic fungi isolated from diverse substrates.

The aim of the present work was to select filamentous fungi isolated from diverse substrates to obtain the strains with potential to produce the hydrolytic enzymes. From a total of 215 strains, seven strains from the soils, six from the plants and one from sugarcane bagasse were selected and identified as belonging to the Trichoderma, Penicillium and Aspergillus genera. The best hydrolytic activities obtained by semi-solid fermentation using these strains were approximately: 35; 1; 160; 170 and 120 U/gdm (CMCase, FPase, ?-glucosidase, xylanase and polygalacturonase, respectively), demonstrating their potential to synthesize the enzymes compared with the results reported in the literature