Methyl Orange Biodegradation by Immobilized Consortium Microspheres: Experimental Design Approach, Toxicity Study and Bioaugmentation Potential

Methyl orange (MO) is categorized among the recalcitrant and refractory xenobiotics, representing a significant burden in the ecosystem. To clean-up the surrounding environment, advances in microbial degradation have been made. The main objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which an autochthonous consortium immobilized in alginate beads can promote an efficient biodegradation of MO. By employing response surface methodology (RSM), a parametric model explained the interaction of immobilized consortium (Raoultella planticola, Ochrobactrum thiophenivorans, Bacillus flexus and Staphylococcus xylosus) to assimilate 200 mg/L of MO in the presence of 40 g/L of NaCl within 120 h. Physicochemical analysis, including UV-Vis spectroscopy and FTIR, and monitoring of the degrading enzymes (azoreductase, DCIP reductase, NADH reductase, laccase, LiP, MnP, nitrate reductase and tyrosinase) were used to evaluate MO degradation. In addition, the toxicity of MO-degradation products was investigated by means of phytotoxicity and cytotoxicity. Chlorella vulgaris retained its photosynthetic performance (>78%), as shown by the contents of chlorophyll-a, chlorophyll-b and carotenoids. The viability of normal lung and kidney cell lines was recorded to be 90.63% and 99.23%, respectively, upon exposure to MO-metabolic outcomes. These results reflect the non-toxicity of treated samples, implying their utilization in ferti-irrigation applications and industrial cooling systems. Moreover, the immobilized consortium was employed in the bioremediation of MO from artificially contaminated agricultural and industrial effluents, in augmented and non-augmented systems. Bacterial consortium remediated MO by 155 and 128.5 mg/L in augmented systems of agricultural and industrial effluents, respectively, within 144 h, revealing its mutual synergistic interaction with both indigenous microbiotas despite differences in their chemical, physical and microbial contents. These promising results encourage the application of immobilized consortium in bioaugmentation studies using different resources.

Disturbance Attenuation and Rejection for a Class of Switched Nonlinear Systems Subject to Input and Sensor Saturations

This paper investigates the problem of disturbance attenuation and rejection for a class of switched nonlinear systems subject to input and sensor saturations, in which exosystem generated disturbances and H2-norm bounded disturbances are considered. The full-order and reduced-order observers are designed according to whether the system states are available or not. Based on the estimating values of the system states and exosystem generated disturbances, the design schemes for the composite controllers are put forward based on the full-order and reduced-order observers, respectively. For a switched system, the input and sensor saturations would influence the effective synthesis of observer and controller. By sector nonlinearity technology, the stability of the augmented closed-loop systems under the proposed composite controllers are analyzed, and the conditions of synthesis of the observers and controllers are further presented to ensure the augmented systems to be robustly asymptotically stable with a weighted H∞ performance level. An example is given to guarantee the effectiveness of the proposed control schemes.