88 documents found, page 1 of 9
Microbial activity of the inoculum determines the impact of activated carbon, m...
Braga, Cátia Sofia Neves; Martins, Gilberto; Duarte, Maria Salomé Lira; Soares, O. Salomé G. P.; Pereira, M. Fernando R.; Pereira, Inês A. C.Available online 7 January 2025; The conversion of organic matter to methane through anaerobic digestion (AD) process can be enhanced by different materials. However, literature reports show inconsistent results on the effect of materials in different AD systems. In this study, we evaluated the influence of the inoculum's activity on methane production (MP) efficiency in the presence of different materials (act...
New decision support system for biogas and electricity forecast in wastewater t...
Martins, Gilberto; Duarte, Maria Salomé Lira; Oliveira, P.; Dias, A.; Marcondes, Francisco Supino; Pereira, M. A.; Novais, PauloAnaerobic digestion processes are often implemented by wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to stabilize and decrease the organic content of primary and secondary sludges. Additionally, this process allows to increase the energetic efficiency of WWTPs. Data from a digestor of a WWTP from the North of Portugal was used to study and design two machine learning models, LSTM-based and GRU-based, to predict energy pr...
Deciphering the impact of activated carbon, magnetite and zeolite on the activi...
Braga, Cátia Sofia Neves; Martins, Gilberto; Duarte, Maria Salomé Lira; Costa, João Carlos Sequeira; Soares, O. S. G. P.; Pereira, M. F. R.Biomethane has a paramount role in the emergent energy transition occurring in Europe, and biotechnological strategies to accelerate biomethane production are needed. In this work, we investigated the effect of several materials (activated carbon (AC), magnetite and zeolite) on the activity of methanogenic cultures, including pure cultures and complex microbial communities. Anaerobic incubations were set up wit...
Effect of micro-aeration on syntrophic and methanogenic activity in anaerobic s...
Morais, Bruno P.; Magalhães, Carla Isabel Pereira; Martins, Gilberto; Pereira, M. A.; Cavaleiro, Ana Júlia VianaMicro-aeration was shown to improve anaerobic digestion (AD) processes, although oxygen is known to inhibit obligate anaerobes, such as syntrophic communities of bacteria and methanogens. The effect of micro-aeration on the activity and microbial interaction in syntrophic communities, as well as on the potential establishment of synergetic relationships with facultative anaerobic bacteria (FAB) or aerobic bacte...
Microplastics biodegradation by estuarine and landfill microbiomes
Pires, Cristina S.; Costa, Luís; Barbosa, Sónia G.; Sequeira, João Carlos; Cachetas, Diogo Macedo; Freitas, José; Martins, Gilberto; Machado, Ana VeraPlastic pollution poses a worldwide environmental challenge, affecting wildlife and human health. Assessing the biodegradation capabilities of natural microbiomes in environments contaminated with microplastics is crucial for mitigating the effects of plastic pollution. In this work, we evaluated the potential of landfill leachate (LL) and estuarine sediments (ES) to biodegrade polyethylene (PE), polyethylene t...
Assessment of LSTM and GRU models to predict the electricity production from bi...
Oliveira, Pedro; Marcondes, Francisco Supino; Duarte, Maria Salomé Lira; Durães, Dalila; Martins, Gilberto; Novais, PauloOver the decades, we have faced escalating global energy consumption and its consequential environmental impacts, including climate change and pollution. This study explicitly evaluates the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) models for predicting electricity production from the biogas produced in a Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) in Portugal. WWTPs play an essential role regar...
Non-conductive silicon-containing materials improve methane production by pure ...
Braga, Cátia Sofia Macedo; Martins, Gilberto; Soares, O. Salomé G. P.; Pereira, M. Fernando R.; Pereira, Inês A. C.; Pereira, Luciana; Alves, M. M.Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2024.131144.; Conductive materials (CM) enhance methanogenesis, but there is no clear correlation between conductivity and faster methane production (MP) rates. We investigated if MP by pure cultures of methanogens (Methanobacterium formicicum, Methanospirillum hungatei, Methanothrix harundinacea and Methanosarcina bark...
Iron nanoparticles application for increasing volatile fatty acid production vi...
Hoffmann, N.; Vergara, Ch.; Ciudad, G.; Tortella, G.; Martins, Gilberto; Rubilar, O.The volatile fatty acid production through transformed organic wastes has been researched since it can be used as a building block for organic compound synthesis. Adding nanomaterials into the reactors helps to boost the acidification stage by strongly degrading biomass through direct or indirect interspecies electron transfer mechanisms. This work aims to show the increase in VFA production by applying zero-va...
Enhancing anaerobic digestion by simultaneous application of a combined treatme...
Hoffmann, Nicolas; Tortella, Gonzalo; Vergara, Christian; Martins, Gilberto; Rubilar, OlgaAnaerobic digestion (AD) is one of the most energy-efficient technologies for treating biodegradable waste since biogas can be generated as a by-product. AD is a biochemical process mediated by a consortium of microorganisms without oxygen in four stages: hydrolysis, acidification, acetogenic and methanogenesis. The addition of iron-based nanoparticles (Fe-NPs) aims to boost the AD process to enhance the biogas...
Improving biomethane production by adding conductive nanomaterials
Rocha, Ana Catarina; Braga, Cátia Sofia Neves; Oliveira, Inês; Soares, O. Salomé G.; Pereira, M. Fernando R.; Pereira, LucianaThe search for renewable energy sources is one of the top priorities of humanity. Biomethane production through anaerobic digestion (AD) could help to reduce the dependence on fossil energy. The addition of conductive nanomaterials (CM) to AD systems results in the acceleration of methane production (MP) and in the improvement of the resilience of these systems. However, the mechanisms underlying this phenomeno...