Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Controlling Accumulation Of Fermentation Inhibitors In Biorefinery Recycle Water Using Microbial Fuel Cells, Abhijeet P. Borole, Jonathan R. Mielenz, Tatiana A. Vishnivetskaya, Choo Y. Hamilton

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Background

Microbial fuel cells (MFC) and microbial electrolysis cells are electrical devices that treat water using microorganisms and convert soluble organic matter into electricity and hydrogen, respectively. Emerging cellulosic biorefineries are expected to use large amounts of water during production of ethanol. Pretreatment of cellulosic biomass results in production of fermentation inhibitors which accumulate in process water and make the water recycle process difficult. Use of MFCs to remove the inhibitory sugar and lignin degradation products from recycle water is investigated in this study.

Results

Use of an MFC to reduce the levels of furfural, 5-hydroxymethylfurfural, vanillic acid, 4-hydroxybenzaldehyde and …

A Shooting Algorithm For Complex Immunodominance Control Problems, Xiaopeng Zhao, R Yang, M Zhang

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering

Although T cells are able to recognize a wide variety of target peptides, they are often strongly focused on a few of the peptides and leave the rest of them unattended. This phenomenon of strongly biased immune response is known as immunodominance. Mathematically, an immunodominance problem can be formulated using optimal control principles as a two-point boundary-value problem. The solution of this problem is challenging especially when the control variables are bounded. In this work, we develop a numerical algorithm based on the shooting technique for bounded optimal control problems. The algorithm is applied to a group of immunodominance problems. …