The Maxwell-Stefan approach to mass transfer

Fungi are an understudied, biotechnologically valuable group of organisms. Due to 
the immense range of habitats that fungi inhabit, and the consequent need to compete against a diverse array of other fungi, bacteria, and animals, fungi have developed numerous survival mechanisms. The unique attributes of fungi thus herald great promise for their application in biotechnology and industry. Moreover, fungi can be grown with relative ease, making production at scale viable. The search for fungal biodiversity, and the construction of a living fungi collection, both have incredible economic potential in locating organisms with novel industrial uses that will lead to novel products. This manuscript reviews fifty ways in which fungi can potentially be utilized as biotechnology. We provide notes and examples for each potential exploitation and give examples from our own work and the work of other notable researchers. We also provide a flow chart that can be used to convince funding bodies of the importance of fungi for biotechnological research and as potential products. Fungi have provided the world with penicillin, lovastatin, and other globally significant medicines, and they remain an untapped resource with enormous industrial potential.

The amazing potential of fungi: 50 ways we can exploit fungi industrially

Agricultural solid wastes either in natural or in modified forms have been successfully used for decades as non-conventional cost-effective adsorbents for removing metal ions and dyes from their aqueous phase and have been recognized as a sustainable solution for wastewater treatment. Therefore, this review article provides extensive literature information about heavy metals and dyes, their classifications and toxicity, various treatment methods with emphasis on adsorption characteristics by numerous agricultural solid wastes, or agricultural solid waste-derived adsorbents under various physicochemical process conditions. This review article not only provided an up-to-date information on the application of sustainable low-cost alternative adsorbents such as agricultural solid wastes, agricultural by-products, and biomass-based cost-effective activated carbon and various other natural materials in the batch adsorptive removal of heavy metal and dye from aqueous phase but also presented a comprehensive compilation of adsorptive pollutant removal information based on various reported continuous column operation studies which is one of the new aspect to this review article. The effectiveness of various batch and column operational process parameters on mechanistic adsorptive removal of both heavy metals and dyes by various agricultural solid waste-based adsorbents has been critically discussed here. Batch and column adsorption mechanism, batch kinetics, column dynamic modeling, and adsorptive behavior of adsorbents under various process parameters have also been critically analyzed and compared. Finally, literature information on recovery and regeneration through desorption techniques and cost comparison of various agricultural solid waste adsorbents with commercial activated carbons have also been reported here. Conclusions have been drawn from the literature reviewed, and few suggestions for future research direction are proposed.

A Review on Heavy Metal Ions and Dye Adsorption from Water by Agricultural Solid Waste Adsorbents

Butanol has a great potential as a biofuel and to date a lot of research has been done both in terms of more efficient butanol production as well as in developing product recovery methods. Many of them deal with separation techniques which can be used for selective recovery of acetone, n-butanol and ethanol from model solutions and fermentation broths. This work is a review of techniques used for ABE recovery, such as distillation, adsorption, gas stripping, liquid–liquid extraction, pertraction, membrane distillation, sweeping gas pervaporation, thermopervaporation and vacuum pervaporation. Advantages and disadvantages of using particular methods, examples of applications and integrated processes are also described.

ABE fermentation products recovery methods—A review

Cadmium is known to be toxic for living organism even if it is present in low levels. Generally it is associated with zinc and copper minerals and is produced as a byproduct of these industries. It enters the environment from electroplating, smelting, alloy manufacturing, pigments, plastic, cadmium-nickel batteries, fertilizers, pesticides, mining, pigments and dyes, textile operations and refining industries. Various ways of cadmium removal are: precipitation, ion exchange, solvent extraction and adsorption. The present review specifically describes various types of adsorbents which have been used for removing cadmium from aqueous solutions. General emphasis has been on the utilization of agricultural, industrial wastes and low cost synthetic oxides as adsorbents. In most of the studies batch mode data has been evaluated by determining the kinetic, isothermic and thermodynamic parameters. A number of studies have also addressed the mechanism of adsorption process employing instrumental techniques such as XRD, FTIR, SEM etc. Modeling of column data has also been reported by some researchers. More attention needs to be given for regeneration/reuse/ safe disposal of the loaded adsorbents wherein the data are insufficient. The engineering aspects also need attention for commercial application of various adsorbents. 

International Journal of Engineering, Science and Technology, Vol. 2, No. 7, 2010, pp. 81-103

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Review on cadmium removal from aqueous solutions

Study on removal of cadmium from wastewater by emulsion liquid membrane.

Isobaric vapor-liquid-liquid equilibria with a newly developed still

A correlation method for isobaric vapor–liquid and vapor–liquid–liquid equilibria data of binary systems

A rate-based simulation method for sieve tray columns is developed with the correlations of clear liquid height and mass transfer rate that were obtained in our previous experiments of the homogeneous and heterogeneous ternary distillation with a sieve tray column. The simulation method is applied to an ethanol dehydration process that consists of a dehydration column and an entrainer recovery column. In the simulation study, the effects of tray specification, overhead vapor concentration, locations of main feed and recycle flow, reflux ratio and recycle flow rate on separation performance of the columns are investigated. The simulation results show that increase of the reflux ratio and recycle flow rate decreases the necessary number of trays of the dehydration column to achieve a specified separation, but it increases the heat duties of the process. Then, the economical analysis of the process is carried out, and the optimum operation conditions of the process are discussed.

Hitoshi Kosuge

Papers

Study on removal of cadmium from wastewater by emulsion liquid membrane.

Isobaric vapor-liquid-liquid equilibria with a newly developed still

A correlation method for isobaric vapor–liquid and vapor–liquid–liquid equilibria data of binary systems

Simulation and optimization of heterogeneous azeotropic distillation process with a rate-based model

Vacuum fermentation integrated with separation process for ethanol production