Monitoring of phenolic compounds in the food industry and for environmental and medical applications has become more relevant in recent years. Conventional methods for detection and quantification of these compounds, such as spectrophotometry and chromatography, are time consuming and expensive. However, laccase biosensors represent a fast method for on-line and in situ monitoring of these compounds. We discuss the main transduction principles. We divide the electrochemical principle into amperometric, voltammetric, potentiometric and conductometric sensors. We divide optical transducers into fluorescence and absorption. The amperometric transducer method is the most widely studied and used for laccase biosensors. Optical biosensors present higher sensitivity than the other biosensors. Laccase production is dominated by a few fungus genera: Trametes, Aspergillus, and Ganoderma. We present an overview of laccase biosensors used for the determination of phenolic compounds in industrial application

A physically based boiler model is developed to solve a set of optimization problems. The model evaluates the normal operation of a 235 MW gas/oil boiler. The model has 7 states in the process and 25 states in the control system. The boiler has a two stage superheater, a single stage reheater and an economizer. The designed steam pressure is 1815 psia with both superheat and reheat temperatures of 1000 deg F. The model is used to solve the optimal set-point scheduling problem in the boiler system. This paper discusses the boiler process state space model.

Worldwide, people’s quality of health has been decreasing due to bad eating habits that have generated an increase in diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, overweight, as well as an increase in hours of the daily workday and stress. This situation can generate sudden illness and work accidents where the need to have knowledge in emergency first response (EFR) is necessary for all. Unfortunately, workshops and courses to certify EFR individuals are usually taught only to healthcare professionals. Therefore, to address this need a EFR project has been developed at the Tecnológico de Monterrey (TEC) which consists of a multidisciplinary challenge to train, certify, and evaluate students’ competency as “emergency first responders” in medical emergencies and healthcare awareness. This EFR project has been performed for one week, every year since 2015, and constitutes a joint venture among academic departments, faculty, and industrial/government institutions, which work together in multidisciplinary projects, providing a source of innovative proposals. The EFR project at TEC has provided instruction and certification for 966 students between 2015 to 2019 and this study has analyzed results considering a sample size of 197 participants. The combination of exam evaluation, medical emergency skills verification, and project proposal results indicate that most students reach skill levels between 2 and 3 in EFR competency after successfully completing the program, regardless of their year of study or the undergraduate program they are enrolled on. This evaluation emphasizes the compromise of the institution and its students in preparation for new living under sanitary conditions for pandemic conditions such as COVID-19.

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In this paper we compare and discuss the performance of a boiler evaporator system when the system is controlled by a traditional PID-type strategy and when the system is enhanced by using fuzzy logic blocks to provide set-points for the system. The strategy used in fuzzy logic controllers (FLCs) is called fuzzy supervisory control and it generates set-points for the conventional controllers. The boiler under test is a VU-60 industrial system that produces 180,000 pounds of steam per hour. The mathematical model of the plant is a scaled version model of that obtained for a thermoelectric unit. The new model simplifies the large-scale thermoelectric boiler model to an industrial small-scale type VU-60 boiler model based upon first principle mass and energy balance equations. The main change consists of representing only the behavior of the drum—evaporator system, having a partial model of the combustion process, with a simplified combustion control system and a three-element boiler feed-water controller. The control system for combustion and boiler feed-water receives a supervisory signal (or set-point tracking signal) that comes from the FLC to improve the performance of the overall control system. The behavior of the supervisory controller brings some advantages to the system performance, compared with the traditional control schemes. The comparison reflects fuel improvements from 2.5% to 6.5% depending upon the steam load ramp regime. The simulations are performed using the SIMULINK® shell running under the MATLAB ® platform.