Abstract: The fourth industrial revolution is changing the role of education substantially and, therefore, the role of instructors and learners at all levels. Education 4.0 is an imminent response to the needs of a globalized world where humans and technology are being aligned to enable endless possibilities, among them the need for students, as digital natives, to communicate effectively in at least one language besides their mother tongue, and also the requirement of developing theirs. This is an exploratory study in which a control group (N = 21), all of the students of Spanish as a foreign language at the university level, after taking a Spanish class, responded to an online questionnaire about the engagement, atmosphere, and environment in which their course was delivered. These aspects considered in the survey were relative to the instructor’s teaching style, including: (a) active, hands-on learning; (b) flexibility for in-class activities, easily switching between small group work, individual work, and whole-class discussion; and (c) integrating technology into the classroom. Strongly believing in these principles, the instructor deliberately taught the course in a SCALE-UP room, as it could facilitate such a positive and encouraging learning environment. These aspects are trends related to Education 4.0 and have become integral to the instructor’s pedagogical stance that calls for a constructive-affective role, instead of a transmissive one. As expected, with a learning environment that (a) fosters student engagement and (b) improves student outcomes, the subjects were highly engaged, which was partially due to the learning environment. An overwhelming majority (all but one) of students agreed or strongly agreed that the atmosphere and the environment were ideal. Outcomes of this study are relevant and indicate that it is about time for teachers to build up a meaningful correlation between humans and technology. We should see the trends of Education 4.0 not as a threat but as practices that should be in the hands of critical and creative instructors whose pedagogical stance responds to the needs of the learners in the 21st century.
Abstract: Polyoxymethylene dimethyl ethers (PODEn) as clean diesel additive can improve the combustion efficiency and quality of diesel fuel and alleviate the problem of atmospheric pollution. Considering synthetic routes, PODE production from methanol and formaldehyde is regarded as the most economical and promising synthetic route. However, methanol used for synthesizing PODE can produce water, which causes the loss of active center of catalyst and hydrolysis of PODEn in the production process. Macroporous strong acidic cation exchange resin catalyst was prepared, which has comparative advantages over other common solid acid catalysts in terms of stability and catalytic efficiency for synthesizing PODE. Catalytic reactions were carried out under 353 K, 1 MPa and 3mL·gcat-1·h-1 in a fixed bed reactor. Methanol conversion and PODE3-6 selectivity reached 49.91% and 23.43%, respectively. Catalyst lifetime evaluation showed that resin catalyst retained its catalytic activity for 20 days without significant changes and catalytic activity of completely deactivated resin catalyst can basically return to previous level by simple acid regeneration. The acid exchange capacities of original and deactivated catalyst were 2.5191 and 0.0979 mmol·g-1, respectively, while regenerated catalyst reached 2.0430 mmol·g-1, indicating that the main reason for resin catalyst deactivation is that Brønsted acid sites of original resin catalyst were temporarily replaced by non-hydrogen ion cations. A separation process consisting of extraction and distillation for PODE3-6 product was designed for separation of water and unreacted formaldehyde from reactive mixture and purification of PODE3-6, respectively. The concentration of PODE3-6 in final product can reach up to 97%. These results indicate that the scale-up production of PODE3-6 from methanol and formaldehyde solution is feasible.
Abstract: The world-wide population of people over 60 years
of age is growing rapidly. The explosion is placing increasingly
onerous demands on individual families, multiple industries and
entire countries. Current, human-intensive approaches to eldercare
are not sustainable, but IoT and AI technologies can help. The
Knowledge Reactor (KR) is a contextual, data fusion engine built to
address this and other similar problems. It fuses and centralizes IoT
and System of Record/Engagement data into a reactive knowledge
graph. Cognitive applications and services are constructed with its
multiagent architecture. The KR can scale-up and scaledown, because
it exploits container-based, horizontally scalable services for graph
store (JanusGraph) and pub-sub (Kafka) technologies. While the KR
can be applied to many domains that require IoT and AI technologies,
this paper describes how the KR specifically supports the challenging
domain of cognitive eldercare. Rule- and machine learning-based
analytics infer activities of daily living from IoT sensor readings. KR
scalability, adaptability, flexibility and usability are demonstrated.
Abstract: This paper presents the experimental results and the related modeling of a thermal energy storage (TES) facility, ideated and realized by ENEA and realizing the thermocline with an innovative geometry. Firstly, the thermal energy exchange model of an equivalent shell & tube heat exchanger is described and tested to reproduce the performance of the spiral exchanger installed in the TES. Through the regression of the experimental data, a first-order thermocline model was also validated to provide an analytical function of the thermocline, useful for the performance evaluation and the comparison with other systems and implementation in simulations of integrated systems (e.g. power plants). The experimental data obtained from the plant start-up and the short-cut modeling of the system can be useful for the process analysis, for the scale-up of the thermal storage system and to investigate the feasibility of its implementation in actual case-studies.
Abstract: The genus Azotobacter has been widely used as bio-fertilizer due to its significant effects on the stimulation and promotion of plant growth in various agricultural species of commercial interest. In order to obtain significantly viable cellular concentration, a scale-up strategy for a liquid fermentation process (SmF) with two strains of A. chroococcum (named Ac1 and Ac10) was validated and adjusted at laboratory and pilot scale. A batch fermentation process under previously defined conditions was carried out on a biorreactor Infors®, model Minifors of 3.5 L, which served as a baseline for this research. For the purpose of increasing process efficiency, the effect of the reduction of stirring speed was evaluated in combination with a fed-batch-type fermentation laboratory scale. To reproduce the efficiency parameters obtained, a scale-up strategy with geometric and fluid dynamic behavior similarities was evaluated. According to the analysis of variance, this scale-up strategy did not have significant effect on cellular concentration and in laboratory and pilot fermentations (Tukey, p > 0.05). Regarding air consumption, fermentation process at pilot scale showed a reduction of 23% versus the baseline. The percentage of reduction related to energy consumption reduction under laboratory and pilot scale conditions was 96.9% compared with baseline.
Abstract: The thermochemical copper-chlorine (Cu-Cl) cycle is considered as a sustainable and efficient technology for a hydrogen production, when linked with clean-energy systems such as nuclear reactors or solar thermal plants. In the Cu-Cl cycle, water is decomposed thermally into hydrogen and oxygen through a series of intermediate reactions. This paper investigates the thermal scale up analysis of the three phase oxygen production reactor in the Cu-Cl cycle, where the reaction is endothermic and the temperature is about 530 oC. The paper focuses on examining the size and number of oxygen reactors required to provide enough heat input for different rates of hydrogen production. The type of the multiphase reactor used in this paper is the continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) that is heated by a half pipe jacket. The thermal resistance of each section in the jacketed reactor system is studied to examine its effect on the heat balance of the reactor. It is found that the dominant contribution to the system thermal resistance is from the reactor wall. In the analysis, the Cu-Cl cycle is assumed to be driven by a nuclear reactor where two types of nuclear reactors are examined as the heat source to the oxygen reactor. These types are the CANDU Super Critical Water Reactor (CANDU-SCWR) and High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR). It is concluded that a better heat transfer rate has to be provided for CANDU-SCWR by 3-4 times than HTGR. The effect of the reactor aspect ratio is also examined in this paper and is found that increasing the aspect ratio decreases the number of reactors and the rate of decrease in the number of reactors decreases by increasing the aspect ratio. Finally, a comparison between the results of heat balance and existing results of mass balance is performed and is found that the size of the oxygen reactor is dominated by the heat balance rather than the material balance.
Abstract: The gas holdup fluctuations in a bubble column (0.15 m in ID) have been recorded by means of a conductivity wire-mesh sensor in order to extract information about the main transition velocities. These parameters are very important for bubble column design, operation and scale-up. For this purpose, the classical definition of the Shannon entropy was modified and used to identify both the onset (at UG=0.034 m/s) of the transition flow regime and the beginning (at UG=0.089 m/s) of the churn-turbulent flow regime. The results were compared with the Kolmogorov entropy (KE) results. A slight discrepancy was found, namely the transition velocities identified by means of the KE were shifted to somewhat higher (0.045 and 0.101 m/s) superficial gas velocities UG.
Abstract: The biodegradable family of polymers
polyhydroxyalkanoates is an interesting substitute for convectional
fossil-based plastics. However, the manufacturing and environmental
impacts associated with their production via intracellular bacterial
fermentation are strongly dependent on the raw material used and on
energy consumption during the extraction process, limiting their
potential for commercialization. Industrial wastewater is studied in
this paper as a promising alternative feedstock for waste valorization.
Based on results from laboratory and pilot-scale experiments, a
conceptual process design, techno-economic analysis and life cycle
assessment are developed for the large-scale production of the most
common type of polyhydroxyalkanoate, polyhydroxbutyrate.
Intracellular polyhydroxybutyrate is obtained via fermentation of
microbial community present in industrial wastewater and the
downstream processing is based on chemical digestion with
surfactant and hypochlorite. The economic potential and
environmental performance results help identifying bottlenecks and
best opportunities to scale-up the process prior to industrial
implementation. The outcome of this research indicates that the
fermentation of wastewater towards PHB presents advantages
compared to traditional PHAs production from sugars because the
null environmental burdens and financial costs of the raw material in
the bioplastic production process. Nevertheless, process optimization
is still required to compete with the petrochemicals counterparts.
Abstract: There has been a growing interest in the oxygenation
by plunging water jets in the last few years due to their inherent
advantages, like energy-efficient, low operation cost, etc. Though a
lot of work has been reported on the oxygen-transfer by single
plunging water jets but very few studies have been carried out using
multiple plunging jets. In this paper, volumetric oxygen-transfer
coefficient and oxygen-transfer efficiency has been studied
experimentally for multiple inclined plunging jets (having jet plunge
angle of 60 0 ) in a pool of water for different configurations, in
terms of varying number of jets and jet diameters. This research
suggests that the volumetric oxygen-transfer coefficient and oxygentransfer
efficiency of the multiple inclined plunging jets for air-water
system are significantly higher than those of a single vertical as well
as inclined plunging jet for same flow area and other similar
conditions. The study also reveals that the oxygen-transfer increase
with increase in number of multiple jets under similar conditions,
which will be most advantageous and energy-efficient in practical
situations when large volumes of wastewaters are to be treated. A
relationship between volumetric oxygen-transfer coefficient and jet
parameters is also proposed. The suggested relationship predicts the
volumetric oxygen-transfer coefficient for multiple inclined plunging
jet(s) within a scatter of ±15 percent. The relationship will be quite
useful in scale-up and in deciding optimum configuration of multiple
inclined plunging jet aeration system.
Abstract: The microbial production of ethanol from biodiesel¬derived crude glycerol by Enterobacter aerogenes TISTR1468, under micro-aerobic and anaerobic conditions, was investigated. The experimental results showed that micro-aerobic conditions were more favorable for cellular growth (4.0 g/L DCW), ethanol production (20.7 g/L) as well as the ethanol yield (0.47 g/g glycerol) than anaerobic conditions (1.2 g/L DCW, 6.3 g/L ethanol and 0.72 g/g glycerol, respectively). Crude glycerol (100 g/L) was consumed completely with the rate of 1.80 g/L/h. Two-stage fermentation (combination of micro-aerobic and anaerobic condition) exhibited higher ethanol production (24.5 g/L) than using one-stage fermentation (either micro-aerobic or anaerobic condition. The two- stage configuration, exhibited slightly higher crude glycerol consumption rate (1.81 g/L/h), as well as ethanol yield (0.56 g/g) than the one-stage configuration. Therefore, two-stage process was selected for ethanol production from E. aerogenes TISTR1468 in scale-up studies.
Abstract: Bacterial magnetic nanoparticles have great useful potential in biotechnological and biomedical applications. In this study, a liquid growth medium was modified for cultivation a fastidious magnetotactic bacterium that has been isolated from Anzali
lagoon, Iran in our previous research. These modifications include
change in vitamin, mineral, carbon sources and etcetera. In our
experience, the serum bottles and designed air-tight laboratory bottles
were used to create microaerobic conditions in order to development
of a method for scale-up experiment. This information may serve as a
guide to green chemistry based biological protocols for the synthesis
of magnetic nanoparticles with control over the chemical
composition, morphology and size.
Abstract: Nanophotocatalysts such as titanium (TiO2), zinc (ZnO), and iron (Fe2O3) oxides can be used in organic pollutants oxidation, and in many other applications. But among the challenges for technological application (scale-up) of the nanotechnology scientific developments two aspects are still little explored: research on environmental risk of the nanomaterials preparation methods, and the study of nanomaterials properties and/or performance variability. The environmental analysis was performed for six different methods of ZnO nanoparticles synthesis, and showed that it is possible to identify the more environmentally compatible process even at laboratory scale research. The obtained ZnO nanoparticles were tested as photocatalysts, and increased the degradation rate of the Rhodamine B dye up to 30 times.
Abstract: Clustering algorithms help to understand the hidden
information present in datasets. A dataset may contain intrinsic and
nested clusters, the detection of which is of utmost importance. This
paper presents a Distributed Grid-based Density Clustering algorithm
capable of identifying arbitrary shaped embedded clusters as well as
multi-density clusters over large spatial datasets. For handling
massive datasets, we implemented our method using a 'sharednothing'
architecture where multiple computers are interconnected
over a network. Experimental results are reported to establish the
superiority of the technique in terms of scale-up, speedup as well as
cluster quality.