Agromining: farming metals for biosourced materials

Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::12 - Producció i Consum Responsable

Categorization of the main descriptors of different ampicillin crystal habits

With the purpose of enabling the analysis by digital methods of particles of multisource pharmaceutical raw materials, this study analyzed different crystal habits of ampicillin particles, by grouping the external shapes obtained from 3 different solvents (acetonitrile, ethanol, and methanol), thereby reducing the number of descriptors necessary to adequately represent each shape. For this purpose, a selection of morphological descriptors was used including: circularity, roughness, roundness, compactness, aspect ratio, effective diameter, solidity, convexity, fractal dimension, and 10 Complex Fourier descriptors. These measures cover highly diverse morphological properties and define the crystal habit of a particle. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the Cluster Analysis (CA) were the grouping techniques used, which demonstrated the possibility of using between 2 and 4 descriptors instead of the 18 proposed initially.Com o objetivo de possibilitar a análise, por meio de métodos digitais, de partículas de matérias-primas farmacêuticas de múltiplas fontes, analisaram-se diferentes cristais de partículas de ampicilina através do agrupamento de formas externas obtidas de três diferentes solventes (acetonitrila, etanol e metanol), reduzindo, desse modo, o número de descritores necessários para representar adequadamente cada forma. Com esse propósito, utilizou-se seleção de descritores morfológicos, incluindo: circularidade, aspereza, arredondamento, compactação, relação de aspecto, diâmetro efetivo, solidez, convectividade, dimensão fractal e 10 descritores complexos de Fourier. Essas medidas cobrem diversas propriedades morfológicas e definem a cristalinidade de uma partícula. As análises do componente principal (PCA) e por grupamento (CA) foram as técnicas de agrupamento utilizadas, que demonstraram a possibilidade de utilizar entre 2 e 4 descritores ao invés dos 18, inicialmente propostos

Gram-staining characterisation of activated sludge filamentous bacteria by automated colour analysis

An automated image analysis method has been developed for the monitoring of the Gram-staining characteristics of filamentous bacteria in activated sludge. The binary method of pixel classification agreed with manual estimation (level of correlation of 0.9 for Gram-positive bacteria). Its robustness has been assessed by repeatability tests. Population shifts in terms of Gram-staining characteristics have been monitored in laboratory-scale experiments with two feeding schedules using this technique

The Effects of Sludge Digester Biogas Recovery on WWTP Ecological Impacts and Exergetic Balance

International audienc

Characterisation of grinding media wear by visual texture

Three methods of automated characterisation of visual texture—spatial grey-level dependence matrix (SGLDM), grey-level run length (GLRL) and grey-level partial derivatives (GLPD)—have been applied to assess indirectly the wear of grinding media from series of grey-level photographs obtained by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) at different magnifications (between 350 and 5000). The three methods are complementary, but for a routine analysis, the use of a single intermediate magnification (c1500), combined with the SGLDM method, could be advocated to compare the degree of wear