Biomass Characterization by SEM-EDX

Climate change concerns and the post COVID world need urgent solutions to develop sustainable societies with better energy, products and services 1.

Biomass could help but its chemical properties must be known in faster ways2.

Our work delivered a faster and reliable method for elemental analyses of biomass with Scanning Electron Microscopy coupled to Energy Dispersive X-Ray Analysis.

1. United Nations (2015). Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. [online] United Nations. (Accessed on 10 May 2023).

2. Biswas, B., Krishna, B. B., Kumar, M. K., Sukumaran, R. K. & Bhaskar, T. Chapter 7 – Biomass characterization. in Advanced Biofuel Technologies (eds. Tuli, D., Kasture, S. & Kuila, A.) 151–175 (Elsevier, 2022).

Bioenergy from an automatic small facility

Converting waste into bioenergy is a hot topic around the world. Several are the reasons for doing this, ranging from adding value to waste, reducing carbon footprint and air pollutants while producing valuable products like fertilisers and more.

New research unveils the evaluation of the performance on food waste conversion into bioenergy in a decentralised facility, where biological treatment by natural microbes converts food waste into biomass, a process known as anaerobic digestion.

The evaluation not only considers energy efficiency of the entire process but also the removal of organic matter and its conversion into valuable products, that otherwise would end up in the environment.

Results demonstrated that small scale digestion units are technical suitable for biogas production at acceptable level to consider it valuable.

The system could produce its own electricity at an efficiency of up to 0.95% when the yield of methane is 360 litres per kilogram of volatile solids in the food waste fed to the digester, representing a removal of 93% of these solids in the feed stream.

Process stability is normally a problem but in this case high process stability increased thanks to the innovative addiction of an auxiliary storage system.

There were some operation conditions that could compromise the good use of energy to heat up equipment in various stages, the researchers reported*.

*Download from ELSEVIER (last day: 23 Oct 2020). González, R. et al. (2020) ‘Performance evaluation of a small-scale digester for achieving decentralised management of waste’, Waste Management, 118, pp. 99–109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2020.08.020.

Entrepreneurship: Students’ character dominates but uni helps

Researchers have found that teaming up student´s personality and university support favors students intentions to become entrepreneurs in an emerging economy.

The raising  number of calls to become an entrepreneur sounds like welcoming messages to wonderlands. In most of the cases the message is aimed at the youth. And, like in any group of youths,  it would sound easy to push university students to choose an entrepreneurial career, but do they have what it takes?

Is it the student’s proactive personality or the university support environment that affects their entrepreneurial intentions?

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