The hydrogen spill-over mechanism was studied by applying Density Functional Theory. We used small palladium clusters to act as the catalyst supported on the substrate (comprised of pyridinic and pyrrolic nitrogen doped graphene), in order to study hydrogen dissociation, migration and diffusion. Charge transfer and strong binding between the catalyst and the substrate lead to dissociated states of H and prevent clusters from detaching and coalescing. In dissociated cases of H on Pd clusters, energy barriers below 0.6 eV were found. Likewise, concerning hydrogen migration from the catalyst to the substrate, energy barrier values of 0.8 eV (pyridinic defect) and 0.5 eV (pyrrolic defect) were apparent in the case of the Pd cluster at full hydrogen saturation. This indicates that hydrogen dissociation and migration may occur spontaneously at room temperature. This result shows that the interaction between the defects and the small metal clusters may explain the role that defects play in hydrogen migration from the catalyst to the substrate. Subsequently, it was found that thermal desorption does not limit chemisorbed hydrogen diffusion on the substrate. This work may thus help to determine experimental strategies with the capacity to enhance hydrogen storage.

No abstract

Vanilla juice has been shown empirically to have antifungal activity against some fungal strains; however, there are no activity reported against Alternaria genre. In this work, the chemical profile of vanilla juice was obtained and its antifungal activity against fungal strains from the family Pleosporaceae, isolated from sorghum-and barley-diseased plants, was tested. The strains were identified as Alternaria alternata by their molecular and morphological characteristics. The vanilla juice characterization from Vanilla planifolia pods showed the presence of vanillin, vanillic acid, p-hydroxybenzaldehyde, p-hydroxybenzoic acid, guaiacol, glucovanillin, vanillyl alcohol, and furfural. Vanilla juice showed a fungistatic effect against all A. alternata strains tested in this study and increased the lag time from 50 to 112 h, and no conidia were produced. This result indicates the possible application of vanilla juice as an alternative to control agricultural crops such as barley and sorghum in Mexico.

Online monitoring of fermentation processes is a necessary task to determine concentrations of key biochemical compounds, diagnose faults in process operations, and implement feedback controllers. However, obtaining the signals of all-important variables in a real process is a task that may be difficult and expensive due to the lack of adequate sensors, or simply because some variables cannot be directly measured. From the above, a model-based approach such as state observers may be a viable alternative to solve the estimation problem. This work shows a comparative analysis of the real-time performance of a family of sliding-mode observers for reconstructing key variables in a batch bioreactor for fermentative ethanol production. These observers were selected for their robust performance under model uncertainties and finite-time estimation convergence. The selected sliding-mode observers were the first-order sliding mode observer, the proportional sliding mode observer, and the high-order sliding mode observer. For estimation purposes, a power law kinetic model for ethanol production by Saccharomyces cerevisiae was performed. A hybrid methodology allows the kinetic parameters to be adjusted, and an approach based on inference diagrams allows the observability of the model to be determined. The experimental results reported here show that the observers under analysis were robust to modeling errors and measurement noise. Moreover, the proportional sliding-mode observer was the algorithm that exhibited the best performance.

Ethanol was produced using mucilage juice residues from processed cocoa with Pichia kudriavzevii in batch fermentation. Experimental results showed that maximum ethanol concentration was 13.8 g/L, ethanol yield was 0.50 g-ethanol/g glucose with a productivity of 0.25 g/L h. Likewise, a novel phenomenological model based on the mechanism of multiple parallel coupled reactions was used to describe the kinetics of substrate, enzyme, biomass and product formation. Model parameters were optimized by applying the Levenberg-Marquardt approach. Analysis of results was based on statistical metrics (such as confidence interval), sensitivity and by comparing calculated curves with the experimental data (residual plots). The efficacy of the proposed mathematical model was statistically evaluated using the dimensionless coefficient for efficiency. Results indicated that the proposed model can be applied as a way of augmenting bioethanol production from laboratory scale up to semi-pilot scale.