Ricerc@Sapienza

Extensive and improper utilization of water from industrial, municipal, and agricultural activities generate 380 trillion L/y of wastewater worldwide. Wastewaters from different sources contain enormous amounts of nutrients such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Thus, the recovery of these nutrients via appropriate sustainable process becomes a necessity. Among various processes microalgae-based technologies has attracted considerable attention and its strategies for sustainable and low-cost treatment of wastewater has allowed removal of over 70% nutrient loads from the wastewater.

Growing domestic and international ethanol demand is expected to result in increased sugarcane cultivation in Brazil. Sugarcane expansion currently results in land-use changes mainly in the Cerrado and Atlantic Forest biomes, two severely threatened biodiversity hotspots. This study quantifies potential biodiversity impacts of increased ethanol demand in Brazil in a spatially explicit manner. We project changes in potential total, threatened, endemic, and range-restricted mammals' species richness up to 2030.

This paper focuses on microbial fuel cell (MFC) waste valorization, electricity generation and practical applications. A custom electronic analyzer dedicated to MFCs is presented. The measuring system allows to set up a complete electrical characterization of a microbial fuel cell, useful to facilitate and accurately analyze the charge and discharge phase of an MFC. Moreover, it allows power performance analysis and measurement of any kind of MFC typology, using a custom software, which automatically sets up a series of tests over a long period of time.

This paper focuses on applications and electrical valorisation of microbial fuel cells (MFCs), a promising energy harvesting technique, suitable as clean power source to supply low power devices in wireless sensor networks (WSN) for environmental and agricultural monitoring. An MFC is a bioreactor that converts energy stored in chemical bonds of organic matter into electrical energy, through a series of reactions catalysed by microorganisms. An MFC can operate as bioreactor, as bioremediator and as biosensor.

The thermal properties of artichoke waste, a relatively rich source of phenolic antioxidants, were investigated before and after phenolic recovery in order to assess its suitability as a source of bioproducts and bioenergy. The two main fractions of the waste, the bracts and the stems, were submitted to solvent extraction with aqueous ethanol (0, 50, 100% v/v) and the resulting extracts were assayed for total phenolics, flavonoids and antioxidant activity. The polyphenol content of stems was 51.10 ± 0.74 mg GAE/g and that of bracts was 24.58 ± 0.57 mg GAE/g.