Biorefinery for Rehabilitation of Heavy Metals Polluted Areas

Biorefinery applied in heavy metals polluted lands proposed here describes a process starting from soil (polluted and unfit for food and feed production) and solar energy stored in carbohydrates (regarded here as a solar energy carrier) to deliver liquid and gaseous biofuels, green building block chemicals for the market and return the rest of the matter (not delivered to the market) as fertilizer and soil improver, extracting the heavy metals from the polluted soil for safe reuse and remediating the land to sustainably deliver resources in a circular bioeconomy. The circular economy proposed in this chapter offers a novel approach to land rehabilitation by investigating the opportunity for economic value creation as an integral part of a rehabilitation strategy and production of biomaterials and biofuels as renewable energy carriers. The case study approached here can be developed in a complete circular biorefinery process and value chain enabling the use of heavy metals polluted lands for production of renewable energy and biomaterials and at the same time serve as a means of rehabilitation of contaminated lands. This biotechnology can be transferred and adapted in other areas improper for food/feed production due to contamination human industrial activity

A Cost-Effective Embedded Platform for Greenhouse Environment Control and Remote Monitoring

This paper presents the development of a cost-effective automatic system for greenhouse environment control. The architectural and functional features were analyzed in the context of the realization of a controlled-environment agricultural system through all its stages: installation, deployment of the software, integration, maintenance, crop control strategy setup and daily operation of the grower. The proposed embedded platform provides remote monitoring and control of the greenhouse environment and is implemented as a distributed sensing and control network integrating wired and wireless nodes. All nodes were built with low-cost, low-power microcontrollers. The key issues that were addressed include the energy-efficient control, the robustness of the distributed control network to faults and a low-cost hardware implementation. The translation of the supervisory growth-planning information to the operational (control network) level is achieved through a specific architecture residing on a crop planning module (CPM) and an interfacing block (IB). A suite of software applications with flows and interfaces developed from a grower-centric perspective was designed and implemented on a multi-tier architecture. The operation of the platform was validated through implementation of sensing and control nodes, application of software for configuration and visualization, and deployment in typical greenhouses

Development of an electroanalytical method using activated rice husk-derived carbon for the detection of a paraquat herbicide

This work focused on the valorization of local lignocellulosic materials for analytical purpose. The electrode-modifying material was prepared by chemical activation of rice husks with phosphoric acid and calcined at 450 °C. The activated carbon obtained was characterized by different physicochemical and electrochemical techniques, namely yield and burn off during carbonization, apparent volumetric mass, Boehm titration, iodine number, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), CHN elemental analysis, pH at zero-charge point and Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS). These characterizations enabled us to have information on the functional groups present at the material surface, the mass percentage of the elements, the surface load of the material and the charge transfer resistance. The activated carbon thus obtained was used to develop a voltammetric sensor for the analysis of paraquat herbicide. Several parameters which assign the voltammograms to square wave voltammetry (SWV) were studied in order to optimize the developed sensor. The results obtained at optimal conditions are as follows: 10% of activated carbon in the carbon paste, electrolysis potential of −0.9 V, accumulation time of 8 minutes, pH of 8 and the pH at zero load point of 3.45. The results showed that the modified electrode is more sensitive and stable, thus can be used in electroanalysis of xenobiotics