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Industrial processes do not often deal with a pure fluid. Impurities can affect physical properties of gas-liquid systems, resulting in change of gas bubbles velocity. Purpose of the study was to determine drag coefficient of a bubble rising through a contaminated fluid. As well as, a comparison was done between conditions of a free rising bubble and a rising bubble in wall-bounded flow. Thus, the behavior of a single air bubble rises in aqueous rhamnolipid solutions within two columns with different dimensions was studied experimentally. The experiments were conducted at high Reynolds numbers compared to other researches. The results revealed that effect of the surfactant in wall-bounded flow was much less than free flow whereas bubble terminal velocity was close to the one in a pure fluid and independent of concentration. Moreover, terminal velocity of the free rising bubble decreased as the solution concentration increased for the one less than critical micelle concentration. After that, it kept constant. Furthermore, resulted drag coefficient did not change significantly in different biosurfactant concentrations. The results showed that in high Reynolds number, drag coefficient was a function of Eötvös number and independent of Reynolds and Morton numbers. Consequently, two empirical correlations were presented to predict the terminal velocity and drag coefficient based on surface tension and Eötvös number, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A potent biosurfactant-producing bacterial strain isolated from spoiled apples was identified by 16S rRNA asPseudomonas aeruginosaMA01. Compositional analysis revealed that the extracted biosurfactant was composed of high percentages of lipid (66%, w/w) and carbohydrate (32%, w/w). The surface tension of pure water decreased gradually with increasing biosurfactant concentration to 32.5 mN m−1with critical micelle concentration (CMC) value of 10.1 mg L−1. The Fourier transform infrared spectrum of extracted biosurfactant confirmed the glycolipid nature of this natural product. Response surface methodology (RSM) was employed to optimize the biosynthesis medium for the production of MA01 biosurfactant. Nineteen carbon sources and 11 nitrogen sources were examined, with soybean oil and sodium nitrate being the most effective carbon and nitrogen sources on biosurfactant production, respectively. Among the organic nitrogen sources examined, yeast extract was necessary as a complementary nitrogen source for high production yield. Biosurfactant production at the optimum value of fermentation processing factor (15.68 g/L) was 29.5% higher than the biosurfactant concentration obtained before the RSM optimization (12.1 g/L). A central composite design algorithm was used to optimize the levels of key medium components, and it was concluded that two stages of optimization using RSM could increase biosurfactant production by 1.46 times, as compared to the values obtained before optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: An extensive investigation was conducted to isolate indigenous bacterial strains with outstanding performance for biosurfactant production from different types of spoiled fruits, food-related products and food processing industries. An isolate was selected from 800 by the highest biosurfactant yield in soybean oil medium and it was identified by 16S rRNA and the two most relevant hypervariable regions of this gene; V3 and V6 as Pseudomonas aeruginosa MA01. The isolate was able to produce 12g/l of a glycolipid-type biosurfactant and generally less efficient to emulsify vegetable oils compared to hydrocarbons and could emulsify corn and coconut oils more than 50%. However, emulsification index (E24) of different hydrocarbons including hexane, toluene, xylene, brake oil, kerosene and hexadecane was between 55.8% and 100%. The surface tension of pure water decreased gradually with increasing biosurfactant concentration to 32.5mNm−1 with critical micelle concentration (CMC) value of 10.1mg/l. Among all carbon substrates examined, vegetable oils were the most effective on biosurfactant production. Two glycolipid fractions were purified from the biosurfactant crude extracts, and FTIR and ES-MS were used to determine the structure of these compounds. The analysis indicated the presence of three major monorhamnolipid species: R1C10C10, R1C10C12:1, and R1C10C12; as well as another three major dirhamnolipid species: R2C10C10, R2C10C12:1, and R2C10C12. The strain sweep experiment for measuring the linear viscoelastic of biosurfactant showed that typical behavior characteristics of a weak viscoelastic gel, with storage modulus greater than loss modulus at all frequencies examined, both showing some frequency dependence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]