Search

Production of recombinant human insulin precursor using Pichia pastoris involves methanol as an inducer for AOX1 promoter and a carbon source. However, the use of methanol is undesirable, especially on a large scale. Alternatively, mixed carbon sources of methanol-glycerol and methanol-sorbitol were examined. The effects on biomass growth and protein expression were analyzed. By using the mixture of methanol-glycerol and methanol-sorbitol, the protein expression levels were comparable to the level produced by using methanol solely. The protein was expressed at several co-substrate compositions despite that glycerol and sorbitol are considered to have repression effects on the AOX1 promoter. It was shown that glycerol and sorbitol could be partial substitutes for methanol in the production of recombinant human insulin precursors using P. pastoris Mut+. Further studies are necessary to evaluate other important parameters before revamping experimental design and verification at larger scale cultivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methanol plants demand an operational regime above 40% of its design capacity virtually continuously around the year. This excludes many renewable generators without integrated storage because of their volatility. The Integrated CSP-PV-Hybrid (ICPH) concept developed by TSK Flagsol overcomes this challenge: This system is able to drive the electrolysis for more than 8000 hours per year and the sensitive methanol plant for 99.8% of the hours of the year. The overall process also benefits from the inexpensive production of thermal power in parabolic trough collectors. This heat is used partially directly for the methanol distillation, and partly as steam (partially extracted from the turbine) to heat the electrolysis. Such a plant consists exclusively of components and subsystems, which are commercially available today. Due to the cost-efficient, dispatchable solar power technology, economically competitive green methanol is produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, methanol production was simulated using Aspen plus mathematical modelling and the effect of pressure and temperature towards methanol reactor production and selectivity as well as reactant conversions were investigated. Nowadays, the number of methanol plants are increasing due to high demand worldwide. Reactor is one of the main equipment for the methanol production and high impact accident such as explosion, may happen due to the upset of the critical process temperature and pressure which also could create major fluctuation of the methanol production. Thus, the reactor behaviour needed to be studied promptly so that the risk assessment can be performed in a later stage. A mathematical model for the fixed bed catalytic reactor which used RPLUG in Aspen Plus software was developed based on industrial data. The model had been validated and the percent error was below 5.5% compared to the industrial data. The model was also much better compared to the previous research which used ANN MATLAB for the model validation. Overall, it concluded that Aspen Plus simulation for this model could be used to simulate the process with regards to any changes in the process parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]