An in Vitro Study on The Antimicrobial Activity and Antioxidant Activities of The Extract of A Seaweed, Enteromorpha Intestinalis Against Certain Pathogens

Seaweeds are potential bio resources of marine ecosystem and they are the producers of marine ecological energy chain and also possess many bioactive compounds with them. The seaweed Enteromorpha intestinalis is the plant material chosen for the study and was collected from the Pulicat estuary. The collected seaweeds were processed to synthesise nanoparticles out of them and the synthesised silver nanoparticle’s in vitro antimicrobial and antioxidant activity was evaluated. The antibacterial activity was determined by the action against Salmonella typhi, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Micrococcus luteus. Similarly the in vitro antifungal effect was also explored against Candida albicans, Trichoderma viridae, Aspergillus niger, Rizhopus sp and Penicillium notatum. Among them, Staphylococcus aureus and Aspergillus niger were found to be highly susceptible to the synthesised nanoparticles. When the antioxidant efficacy of synthesized nanoparticle was tested using different methods such as DPPH and ABTS it was observed that they possessed appreciable antioxidant property whose efficiency was correlated with their respective positive standards. These investigations illustrated the potential effects of the seaweed E. intestinalis for using them as an active antimicrobial and antioxidant agent.

Substantiation of performance indicators of mine monorail locomotives

Mine transport is an integral part of mining process. The performed analysis of modern monorail autonomous locomotives indicates that this type of underground auxiliary transport is the most promising today due to a number of advantages that were identified in this study. To assess performance indicators of mine monorail locomotives, a number of characteristics are currently used, for instance, the dependences between several parameters of propulsion system operation. The type of characteristic is determined by an independent variable to be selected from the list of the operational or design parameters. To substantiate performance indicators of autonomous mine suspended monorail locomotives, the authors proposed the relationship between the characteristics of the traction energy chain equipment and the diesel locomotive propulsion system efficiency factor. To assess the efficiency of mine suspended monorail locomotive operation, a composite indicator for assessing efficiency of various types of traction was proposed: the operational efficiency factor. This indicator takes into account varying the efficiency factor of the energy chain units depending on their operating modes. When determining the functional dependencies of varying the efficiency factor of power and auxiliary units of monorail locomotives, a grouping of the main parameters according to the features depending on the economic characteristics of the propulsion system and its operating modes was proposed. The operational efficiency factor of the locomotive as a whole is determined both by the economic characteristics of all units of its energy chain and by the modes of their operation.

Transport Cost Estimation Model of the Agroforestry Biomass in a Small-Scale Energy Chain

The delivery of biomass products from the production place to the point of final transformation is of fundamental importance within the constitution of energy chains based on biomass use as a renewable energy source. Transport can be one of the most economically expensive operations of the entire biomass energy production process, which limits choices in this sector, often inhibiting any expansive trends. A geographic identification, through remote sensing and photo-interpretation, of the different biomass sources was used to estimate the potential available biomass for energy in a small-scale supply chain. This study reports on the sustainability of transport costs calculated for different types of biomass sources available close a biomass power plant of a small-scale energy supply chain, located in central Italy. To calculate the transport cost referred to the identified areas we used the maximum travel time parameter. The proposed analysis allows us to highlight and visualize on the map the areas of the territory characterized by greater economic sustainability in terms of lower transport costs of residual agroforestry biomass from the collection point to the final point identified with the biomass power plant. The higher transport cost was around €40 Mg−1, compared to the lowest of €12 Mg−1.

Transport Cost Estimation Model of the Agroforestry Biomass in a Small-Scale Energy Chain

The delivery of biomass products from the production place to the point of final use is of fundamental importance within the constitution of energy chains based on biomass use as renewable energy source. In fact, transport can be one of the most economically expensive operations of the entire biomass energy production process. In this work, a geographic identification, through remote sensing and photo-interpretation, of the different biomass sources was used to estimate the potential available biomass for energy in a small-scale supply chain. The economic sustainability of transport costs was calculated for different types of biomass sources available close to a biomass power plant of a small-scale energy supply chain, in central Italy. The proposed analysis allows us to highlight and visualize on the map the areas of the territory characterized by greater economic sustainability in terms of lower transport costs of residual agroforestry biomass from the collection point to the final point identified with the biomass power plant. The higher transport cost was around € 40 Mg−1, compared to the lowest of € 12 Mg−1.

Cooperative Demand Response Framework for a Smart Community Targeting Renewables: Testbed Implementation and Performance Evaluation

Demand response (DR) is emerging as the workhorse of achieving energy efficiency and reducing our carbon footprint, which persists as a major challenge amongst all the different energy-chain players, i.e., the utility providers, policy makers, consumers, and the technology sector. For instance, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm and network-enabled appliances/devices have escalated the expectations of what technology could do for the acceptance of DR programs. In this work, we design, deploy on a scalable pilot testbed, and evaluate a collaboration-based approach to the demand-side management of a community of electricity consumers that jointly targets green consumption. The design of the framework architecture is centralized via the so-called aggregator, which optimizes the demand scheduled by consumers along with their time frame preferences towards the maximization of the consumption of renewables. On the pilot, we opt for lightweight, yet efficient platforms such as Raspberry Pi boards, and evaluate them over a series of network protocols, i.e., MQTT-TLS and CoAP-DTLS, paying special attention to the security and privacy of the communications over Z-Wave, ZigBee, and WiFi. The experiments conducted are configured using two active Living Labs datasets from which we extract three community scenarios that vary according to the flexibility or rigidity of the appliances’ operation time frame demand. During the performance evaluation, processing and communication overheads lie within feasible ranges, i.e., the aggregator requires less than 2 s to schedule a small consumer community with four appliances, whereas the latency of its link to households’ controllers adds less than 100 ms. In addition, we demonstrate that our implementations running over WiFi links and UDP sockets on Raspberry Pi 4 boards are fast, though insecure. By contrast, secure CoAP (with DTLS) offers data encryption, automatic key management, and integrity protection, as well as authentication with acceptable overheads.

Analysis of energy and greenhouse gas emissions of rice straw to energy chain in Egypt

Rice straw as a source of energy could substitute for fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Thus, the aim of this paper was to analyze the energy and GHG emissions of rice straw to the energy chain in Egypt. The analysis was performed starting from paddy production, straw collection and transportation, and energy generation for two scenarios: power plant and anaerobic digestion plant. The results showed that the paddy production and transportation stage represented the highest contribution of the total energy consumption and GHG emissions for the two scenarios, respectively. The energy potential was estimated with 4193 GWh electricity and 25,647 × 106 MJ of biogas energy. It was also found that use of rice straw as an energy source could reduce the use of fossil fuel and mitigate air pollution from direct burning of rice straw by 3 Mt CO2-eq of GHG emissions.