Ciencias Exactas y Ciencias de la Salud
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11285/551039
Pertenecen a esta colección Tesis y Trabajos de grado de las Maestrías correspondientes a las Escuelas de Ingeniería y Ciencias así como a Medicina y Ciencias de la Salud.
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- A plant-wide analysis of an industrial flocculation process in biomanufacturing(Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, 2022-07-26) Malacara Becerra, Alonso; Parra Saldívar, Roberto; puemcuervo; Mansouri, Seyed Soheil; Sosa Hernández, Juan Eduardo; School of Engineering and Sciences; Campus Monterrey; Melchor Martínez, Elda MadaiThis master thesis project is a case-study of the biomass dewatering operations of the industrial waste treatment plant (iWTP) that is shared by the biotech companies Novozymes A/S and Novo Nordisk A/S in Kalundborg, Denmark. More than 4000 m3 of biomass sludge are dewatered every day in the plant using decanter centrifuges. The biomass sludge is a mix of spent biomass from the biotech production and waste activated sludge. The concentrated cake is sold to an external biogas facility and the clarified liquid remains in the plant for removal of the remaining pollutants. The efficiency of this separation depends largely on chemical dosing with a coagulant and a flocculant solution. The composition of the biomass sludge is subject of the changing biotech production upstream, which difficults optimization of the chemical dosing. Moreover, the particle processes in complex dynamic systems such as decanter centrifuges are poorly understood. Therefore, the aim of this project was to develop and test tools to aid on the monitoring, study and decision-making in the dewatering of biomass sludge. Several steps were followed to accomplish this. First, an on-line degassing system and a Random Forests prediction model were integrated into an on-line sensor for determination of reject water quality. The Random Forests model was trained with color features and total suspended solids (TSS) measurements of degassed reject water (dRW). Next a measuring campaign was carried out over 15 production batches to collect data from samples of biomass sludge before and after dewatering. Novel technology from ParticleTech® was used to collect particle images from these samples. The images were used to build and train an image analysis pipeline for the clustering of particles based on their morphology. Additionally, the new particle data was used to study the influence of pH and polymer dose on the particle population of the of the biomass sludge, as well as to find associations between particle cluster removal and reject water quality. The best prediction model achieved an accuracy of 80.81% on the prediction of TSS of dRW using the three color features that define the HSV color space. This system can potentially save time on the decanter optimization procedure. However, more data and re-training of the model are necessary before full-scale implementation. Clustering of particles images resulted in the identification of 10 main particle sub-populations. The study of flocculation based on the particle clusters showed a strong association between the removal of TSS in reject water and the removal of the larger particles from cluster K9. The removal of this cluster was also highly sensitive to polymer dose, benefiting from polymer overdosing most of the times. Thus, morphology-based data was demonstrated to be a new source of information that can potentially help elucidate the particle processes associated to the dewatering of the biomass sludge. This project was carried out within the frame of the Helix Lab Fellowship Program.
- Revalorization of Coffea arabica agrowaste through the recovery of phenolic compounds using a green extraction process(Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, 2021) Macias Garbett, Rodrigo; Parra Saldívar, Roberto; puelquio; Sosa Hernández, Juan Eduardo; Melchor Martínez, Elda Madai; Escuela de Ingeniería y Ciencias; Campus Monterrey; Contreras Esquivel, Juan CarlosThe high caffein and tannin content of coffee agrowaste makes it highly toxic and hinders its disposal and recycling. The usage of this byproduct persists as a challenge in the industrial landscape. Coffee agro-waste is a potential resource of polyphenols with antioxidant activity and application in the food and cosmetic trades. This study presents a green extractive process using pulsed electric field (PEF) and microwave assisted extraction (MAE) to recover polyphenols from coffee silverskin and pulp, posing lower processing times and the use of water as the only solvent. The performance of this process on the phenolic yield was assessed through the Folin-Ciocalteu assay and the DPPH radical scavenging activity test. The phenolic composition of the extracts was also determined through HPLC-MS and quantified through HPLC-DAD. When compared to treatment controls, PEF + MAE treated samples were found to have enhanced yields of total phenolic content and radical scavenging activity in all analyzed residues. The chromatographic studies reveal that caffeic acid is the main phenolic compound of the three analyzed by-products. The HPLC-DAD caffeic acid quantification validated that a combination of MAE + PEF treatment in yellow coffee pulp had the highest caffeic acid concentration of all studied treatments.
- Crisis of high mountain coffee production in Mexico: Principal contributors and further perspectives.(Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, 2020-06-20) Torres Castillo, Nora Esther; Parra Saldívar, Roberto; emipsanchez/tolmquevedo; Nasir Iqbal, Hafiz Muhammad; School of Engineering and Sciences; Campus Monterrey; Melchor Martínez, Elda MadaiAs a researcher, we have to be able to cover a wide range of topics related to any field, from chemistry to biology. During the development of solutions, it is important to identify the roots of the problem. This can lead to the generation of knowledge from different perspectives. A perfect example is this work, which started as the study of coffee leaf rust in Mexican crops, where 70% of the total production is lost due to this disease. However, as we continued, we identify other crucial factors, not only related to coffee rust adaptation, but behind the urgent crisis of high mountain coffee in Mexico: the COVID pandemic, that has generated losses of 40% in the coffee demand, the fluctuations in the patterns of precipitation and temperature as a result of climate change since 2006 to the present time, and the lack of opportunities to access to a more competitive market, as a smallholder. Therefore, to generate an integral solution, besides politics and socio-economical reforms, we decided to take a circular economy approach. How can we create new sources of income for this sector and at the same help to reduce climate variability? Our answer, through the introduction of coffee by-products to the value chain. Mexico is the leading exporter of High mountain coffee in the world; Thus, by the generation of technology base on coffee by-products, we can tackle both problems. The examples are caffeine bio adsorbents, made of the coffee husk, or spent ground coffee, used as a substrate for bioethanol production. Even in the future, coffee by-products can serve as raw material to develop scaffolds for catalysis reactions. In the end, the principal purpose of this research was to offer alternatives to ensure the prevalence of high mountain crops, which are the basis of Mexican coffee.