The influence of membrane excitations on bioethanol production in a forced fermentor.

Abstract Modeling and numerical simulation are implemented to investigate the influence of membrane excitations on the production of bioethanol in a forced fermentor. Three well developed attractors in the frequency locking, quasi-periodic and chaotic regions are subjected to membrane excitations. Two membrane configurations are employed for each case: the shock type and the linear dynamic membranes. It is interesting that all membrane configurations exhibit wealthy regions of complex dynamics and very beneficial to the fermentor performance. The simulated results reveal various fascinating phenomena such as hyperchaos, chaos and large bubble windows. It was shown that the chaotic regions are the attractive and best potential regions for the implementation of the membrane excitations. It is interesting to note that when the shock type and linear membranes are imposed on chaotic regions, the hyperchaotic attractors arise and have substantial impact in increasing the average ethanol yield to 18.98% and 19.29%, respectively. It is obvious that the linear dynamic membranes are superior to the shock type membranes with respect to the bioreactor performance. The bubble windows show an incomplete odd sequence of bubble birth of 1, 3 and 5 bubbles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]