Biogas Generation from Maize and Cocksfoot Growing in Degraded Soil Enriched with New Zeolite Substrate

Degraded lands are potential areas for obtaining biomass which can serve as an energy source after its conversion into biogas. Thus, the studies on biogas production from maize and cocksfoot biomasses obtained from degraded soil supplemented with additions of new zeolite substrate (Z-ion as the nutrient carrier) and on arable soil (reference soil) were carried out during batch digestion tests. It was found that the biogas and biomethane potentials and specific energy of the test species growing in degraded soil enriched with Z-ion additions (1% and 5% v/v in the cases of cocksfoot and maize, respectively) did not differ significantly from the values of these parameters that were found for the plants growing in arable soil. The application of Z-ion to the degraded soil (especially in a dose of 5% v/v) resulted in an increase in the nitrogen content and decrease (below the lower optimum value) in the C/N ratio in the plant biomass. However, these changes did not negatively influence the final values of the biogas or methane potentials or the specific energy found for the maize biomass. Therefore, the study results indicated the usefulness of Z-ion substrate for improving the growth conditions for energy crops in degraded soils and, as a consequence, obtaining a plant feedstock suitable for the digestion process.

Investigation of specific energy absorption of natural fiber honeycomb sandwich structure composite as building construction material application

The usage of incorporating natural fibre in composite material has seen some potential to be used as a future building construction material due to its recyclability, lightweight and high-reliability feature. However, the issue of implementing natural fibre as building construction material in composites material concerns the structural integrity of the material. As the characteristics of the natural fibre honeycomb composite have been discovered more in terms of properties which ranges from its physical and chemical structural composition to the quasi-static impact collapse of the material, the absorption energy of the material in different cell geometry is unknown. Therefore, the purpose of this study involves the testing of the natural fibre honeycomb (NFH) composite made from cement fibre (face sheet) and corn starch (core) with regards to its crushing behaviour when subjected to flatwise compression load according to ASTM D-3410 standard to analyse the performance of energy absorption of NFH composite with different thicknesses of the hexagonal core and cell wall thickness to determine the Specific Energy Absorption of the material. The result obtained shows that the increasing thicknesses of the core and cell wall improves the ability of the composite to absorb more energy and the specific energy absorption is higher when both factors are increased.

Designing porous and stable Au coating Ni nanosheets based Ni foam for quasi-symmetric polymer Li–air Batteries

Li–air cells have aroused intense interest because of ultra-high specific energy, but their practical application is still hindered by many problems, such as slurry reaction kinetics and serious parasitic reaction...