Browsing by Author "Chen, Li-Jung"
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Item Biological treatment of hazardous air pollutants from corn-to-biofuel dry mill production facilities(2009-05) Chen, Li-Jung; Kinney, Kerry A.; Katz, Lynn EllenDevelopment of renewable energy sources such as ethanol has become a priority to meet growing energy demands. In the United States, the majority of ethanol is produced at dry mill facilities that convert corn to ethanol; these facilities can be a major emission source for volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Biofiltration is a promising VOC control technology but its effectiveness for the VOC mixtures emitted from ethanol production facilities has yet to be determined. The main goal of this research was to evaluate the feasibility of using biofiltration to treat ethanol plant air pollutants. To accomplish this, microbial degradation of four representative pollutants (formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, ethanol and acetic acid) was examined first in simplified batch reactors and then in a laboratory-scale biofilter system. The batch data indicate that, at a neutral pH, an enriched microbial consortium was capable of completely degrading formaldehyde, acetaldehyde and ethanol, and the Monod model was successfully utilized to describe single substrate degradation kinetics for these pollutants. However, the consortium only partially degraded acetic acid. In binary substrate experiments, acetaldehyde degradation was not significantly affected by either ethanol or formaldehyde. However, acetaldehyde inhibition of ethanol degradation was observed and inhibition kinetics were necessary to describe the observed ethanol removals. Formaldehyde degradation was inhibited in the presence of acetaldehyde and/or ethanol; however, further research will be required to identify the inhibtion. The biofilter study was performed to investigate the effects of pollutant loading, substrate mixtures and low pH on system performance. The results indicate that it is feasible to achieve greater than 97% overall removal efficiency at a short contact time of 5 seconds under neutral pH conditions. The level of substrate inhibition observed in the batch experiments was not evident in the biofilter experiments. However, low pH conditions gradually decreased the biofilter performance with a more significant impact on acetaldehyde, a result that was supported by batch data. Finally, a numerical model that integrated degradation kinetics was able to describe the biofilter performance under the test conditions. This research demonstrates that biofiltration has the potential to be a viable VOC treatment technology at corn-derived ethanol production facilities.Item Characterization and Quantification of Biological Surfaces Using Cluster ToF-SIMS with the Event-By-Event Bombardment/Detection Mode(2012-07-16) Chen, Li-JungCluster ToF-SIMS (time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry) operated in the event-by-event bombardment/detection mode has been applied to: 1) evaluate and screen the manufacturing quality of step-wise prepared micropatterned biointerfaces; 2) quantify the binding density of Au nanoparticles (AuNPs)-antiCD4 conjugates selectively attached on the cell surface; 3) elucidate the biological interaction of proteins and molecules by quantifying the fractional coverage of immobilized biomolecules; 4) enhance the accuracy of secondary ion identification of specific molecules. Briefly, our method consists of recording the secondary ions, SIs, individually emitted from a single projectile impact (C60 1,2+, Au400 +4). From the set of individual mass data, we select events where a specific SI was detected. The selected records reveal the SIs co-ejected from the nanovolume impacted by an individual cluster projectile from an emission area of 10-20 nm in diameter and an emission depth of 5-10 nm. The approach for quantifying the number of AuNPs or that of specific nanodomains is via the concept of the fractional coverage. The latter is the ratio of the effective number of projectile impacts on a specified sampling area (Ne) to the total number of impacts (No). The methodology has been validated with the determination of the number of antibody-AuNP conjugates on a cell, i.e. the number of disease related antigens on a cell via their specific binding sites with the AuNP-labeled antibodies. The number of AuNP-antibodies measured, ~42000 per cell, is in good agreement with literature results. The fractional coverage concept was also used to quantify several variants of biointerfaces. An example is the quantification of biotin and avidin immobilization as a function of the composition of silane substrates. The data collected in the event-by-event bombardment/detection mode expands the scope and quality of analytical information. One can identify SIs co-emitted with two specified SIs (double coincidence mass spectrometry) to inspect a specific stratum of a biointerface. A further refinement is the selection of events meeting a double coincidence emission condition. This mode enables the identification of nano-object of a few nm in size, which eliminates (anticoincidence) interferences from substrates.