Ricardo Morales-Rodriguez

Ricardo Morales-Rodriguez
University of Guanajuato · Departamento de Ingeniería Química

PhD. Chemical Engineering

About

72
Publications
17,291
Reads
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941
Citations
Additional affiliations
April 2012 - January 2015
Metropolitan Autonomous University
Position
  • Professor (Full)
June 2009 - September 2011
Technical University of Denmark
Education
February 2006 - March 2009
Technical University of Denmark
Field of study
  • Product and Process Design

Publications

Publications (72)
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Butanol is an interesting biofuel and a product precursor, that could be obtained with acetone and ethanol via fermentation. The biofuels production has been identified as not economically competitive, thus, the parallel production of high value-added products, such as xylitol, could be an alternative to improve the profit. Xylitol can be p...
Chapter
Currently, chemical processes must be designed and optimized considering multicriteria objectives focused on sustainable aspects. These targets can be effectively achieved via a systematic framework, capable to guide the users to take the best decision in terms of given objectives. Thus, the present work develops and implements a framework through...
Chapter
The global situation forces to design processes based on sustainable metrics and capable to respond to constant changes in the world. Particularly, the field of chemical processes requires an intensive energetic demand. These requirements force the scientist to develop systematic frameworks focused on mathematical formulations and computer- aided t...
Chapter
The modern design of chemical processes should involve holistic objective functions as well as the consideration of uncertainty sources. This work presents an optimization framework for flexible design combining stochastic programing with metaheuristic algorithm as solver, the 4E analysis as objective functions, and the integration of a decision-ma...
Chapter
Full-text available
The second-generation biobutanol production from lignocellulosic material is one of the key interests for research, considering the future of alternative energies based on the circular economy action plans. An important part of the butanol production process depends on the substrate, and therefore on the pretreatment technologies available for decr...
Chapter
Full-text available
Several systematic methodologies for designing and optimizing conceptual processes have been reported by combining different computer-aided tools, mainly based on process simulators and programming environments that can help to improve any processes significantly. Thus, the objective of this work involves the performance analysis for virtual platfo...
Chapter
Harnessing biomass has accompanied humanity along with history. For instance, transforming biomass into energy (i.e., thermal and electrical energy or transport biofuels) has had its most recent apexes in the mid-1800s where 90% of the energy and fuel needs in the USA were supplied by wood, currently the global market is valued at USD 49.8 billion...
Chapter
This study presents a systematic methodology for process synthesis based on superstructure optimization, which identifies the optimal configuration of a biorefinery to produce high value chemical and biochemical products, by maximizing product profits and minimizing process energy costs and the investment costs. The case study employed agave bagass...
Article
Full-text available
In this work, alkaline hydrogen peroxide pretreatment (AHP), at low concentrations of chemical reagents and mild temperature, on sugarcane bagasse was evaluated for production of bioethanol via enzymatic hydrolysis using Cellic® CTec3 from Novozymes® and fermentation using Saccharomyces cerevisiae wild-type strain AR5. Sodium hydroxide NaOH and cal...
Article
The bio-production of lactic acid (LA) has gained great attention thanks to its versatility as building block with potential environmental and energy benefits. During its bio-production, one of its bottlenecks is the downstream processing, where process intensification plays a significant role to increase process profitability. This work presents a...
Conference Paper
Fast global population growth has imposed an increasing demand for feedstock, food, energy and commodities; therefore, the industries are in constant development to optimize their processes. From the Process System Engineering (PSE) perspective this problem could be addressed employing mathematical models that describe the processes behaviour. Howe...
Chapter
Fast global population growth has imposed an increasing demand for feedstock, food, energy and commodities; therefore, the industries are in constant development to optimize their processes. From the Process System Engineering (PSE) perspective this problem could be addressed employing mathematical models that describe the processes behaviour. Howe...
Article
Biobutanol is a biofuel with potential to substitute gasoline. It can be obtained through fermentation of lignocellulosic material, from where acetone, butanol and ethanol (ABE) are obtained and subsequently separated. Nevertheless, the blend ethanol‐butanol is itself a fuel, thus its separation could be not even necessary. In this work, an alterna...
Article
Full-text available
In the last decades, the need of cleaner and renewable fuels has increased the use of alcohols to power internal combustion engines. The ABE (acetone–butanol–ethanol) method to produce purified biobutanol and bioethanol is the most known and well-studied method to produce those alcohols. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear how the bioethanol’s conten...
Article
The design of optimal sustainable processes must be performed relying on systematic steps, which must guide the users to take the best decision in terms of given objectives. This study proposes and implements a framework consisting of organized steps combining methods and tools, using as a case study the separation and purification of the acetone-b...
Article
Lactic acid (LA) is a compound with a considerable range of application in industry, where its use as precursor of diverse products is currently relevant. Thus, it is important to complement experimental efforts to investigate the design of the lactic acid production relying in computer-aided tools using a process system engineering approach. This...
Article
Full-text available
This work focuses on the exergy analysis of an extractive distillation column in the second-generation bioethanol production process. The study of the exergy performance of the separation and purification section is relevant from a thermodynamic point view due to the large amount of the energy consumed by their unit operations. A sensitivity analys...
Article
The design of optimal product, mixtures and processes must be performed relying on systematic steps. For example, the separation and purification of the acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE) from a fermentation broth is still a challenge to overcome. A feasible process configuration that includes the use of liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) and distillation,...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The production of 2G bio-butanol has been mostly analysed from an experimental approach, while the development of mathematical models has been focused on the evaluation of global process performance and coupling different unit operations. However, modelling and simulation have not been explored to investigate design configurations, whic...
Article
Full-text available
This work focuses on a way to integrate the social, environmental and economic aspects (socio-eco-efficient aspects) together in the decisions concerning the sustainable process synthesis of a lignocellulosic (Agave bagasse) biorefinery. This challenge is addressed by the formulation and solution of a multiobjective optimization model of a process...
Article
The dependence on non-renewable resources, particularly fossil fuels, has awaken a growing interest in research of sustainable alternative energy sources, such as bioethanol. The production of bioethanol from lignocellulosic materials comprises three main stages, starting with a pretreatment, followed by an enzymatic hydrolysis step where fermentab...
Article
Biodiesel and bioethanol are among the most studied biofuels. For the production of biodiesel, the use of supercritical alcohols has been reported as an alternative with some advantages over the traditional base-catalyzed processes. Nevertheless, due to the high pressure and temperature conditions under which the supercritical process operates, the...
Article
Full-text available
The biobutanol production have gained special attention due to diverse positive characteristics compared with bioethanol, but one of the paramount problems is found at the downstream processes section. In order to tackle that issue, a systematic framework for sustainable product and process design including the optimization of the problem consideri...
Article
Full-text available
Biofuels provide an attractive alternative for satisfying energy demands in a more sustainable way than fossil fuels. To establish a biorefinery, an optimal plan must be implemented for the entire associated supply chain, covering such aspects as selection of feedstocks, location, and capacity of biorefineries, selection of processing technologies,...
Article
Pt–Ag/C catalyst was prepared by sonication to evaluate its catalytic activity for the oxygen reduction (ORR) and methanol oxidation reactions (MOR). The synthesized material was characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), elemental disperse spectroscopy (EDS), scanning (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques. Cyclic voltammetry,...
Article
The increasing attention toward sustainable developments as alternative solutions for the climate change problems have generated the interest to propose optimal synthesis configurations of biorefineries. These kind of challenges have been partially addressed employing mathematical optimization of superstructures, which mostly includes economic and...
Article
Experimental work in dynamic fermentations is challenging mainly due to the sensitive nature of the biological system, the time variant conditions along the experiments and low automation of the process. Therefore, tremendous experimental effort is needed in order to identify optimal operation conditions useful to be scaled up. In this contribution...
Article
Biofuels have taken importance on the last years, due to the concern on the environmental impact of the transport sector. One of the most known liquid biofuels is biodiesel. The use of supercritical alcohols to produce biodiesel has been studied recently because of its advantages over the methods with homogeneous catalysts. Nevertheless, due to the...
Conference Paper
The increasing attention toward sustainable developments as alternative solutions for the climate change problems have generated the interest to propose optimal synthesis configurations of biorefineries. These kind of challenges have been partially addressed employing mathematical optimization of superstructures, which mostly includes economic and...
Chapter
This chapter presents an overview on how process intensification has influenced biotechnology applications from a multidisciplinary perspective. Initially, the process intensification philosophy is contextualized into biotechnology due to the particular challenges of these processes. This leads to a conceptual map analyzing the disciplines interact...
Article
Biomass is a renewable resource that has attractive characteristics for energy production, but the corresponding supply chain could be subject of several uncertain factors that can affect drastically the optimal configuration, and those have not been properly accounted in previous publications. Therefore, this work presents a new approach for the o...
Article
Full-text available
Recently, the biomass has gained considerable attention as a feedstock for energy production because of its attractive characteristics, including its availability as a renewable resource. However, the biomass can be subjected to several uncertain factors such as the availability, market cost and composition; thus, it is worth noting that the uncert...
Article
Full-text available
The xylitol production has become an important process to investigate given the diverse product applications, especially in the food industry. The biotechnological xylitol production has been assessed mainly through an experimental approach via batch and fed-batch operation. This study presents an analysis for optimal operation of the fed batch pro...
Article
An integrated reactive distillation process for the production of biodiesel is proposed. The reactive separation process consists of two coupled reactive distillation columns considering the kinetically controlled reactions of esterification of the fatty acids (FFAs) and the trans-esterification of the tri-di and mono glycerides with methanol, resp...
Article
Full-text available
This study visualizes the production of xylitol by a fermentation process in a continuous stirred tank bioreactor. In the first step, a validated dynamic kinetics model was recalled and extended for describing a continuous process. Next, through a likewise sensitivity analysis the uniqueness of steady states was established, and the process conditi...
Article
This study presents an analysis for acetone, butanol and ethanol production process. Firstly, a systematic methodology for model-based simulation is proposed in order to perform an appropriate modelling task in the analysis of production processes. The implementation of the systematic methodology allowed the evaluation of four ABE production proces...
Article
Full-text available
The objective of this study is to perform a comprehensive enzyme kinetics analysis in view of validating and consolidating a semimechanistic kinetic model consisting of homogeneous and heterogeneous reactions for enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass proposed by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (Kadam et al., Biotechnol Prog...
Article
This study presents the development and implementation of regulatory control structures in the operation of a Simultaneous Saccharification and Co-Fermentation (SSCF) using Proportional-Integral (PI) controllers. To this end, two different feasible case studies were analyzed: 1) assuming lower cellulose and xylan fractions in the feedstock used to...
Article
This study presents the development and application of a systematic model-based framework for bioprocess optimization. The framework relies on the identification of sources of uncertainties via global sensitivity analysis, followed by the quantification of their impact on performance evaluation metrics via uncertainty analysis. Finally, stochastic...
Article
Full-text available
This study presents the development and application of a systematic model-based framework for bioprocess optimization, evaluated on a cellulosic ethanol production case study. The implementation of the framework involves the use of dynamic simulations, sophisticated uncertainty analysis (Monte-Carlo technique) and sensitivity analysis (such as glob...
Chapter
This chapter highlights models for different (dynamic) applications. The development of the model needs to consider different phenomena that take place during the operation of the process. Some of the key mechanisms, assumptions considered in the mathematical model as well as the development of the model in terms of mass and energy balances, and co...
Chapter
This chapter highlights the theme modelling for bio, agro and pharma applications. It opens up by providing an example from the agro-chemical sector and highlighting the modelling of the performance of a microcapsule for controlled release. It focuses on the development and solution of a mathematical model of microcapsule-based controlled release o...
Conference Paper
Optimization techniquesand methods are commonly used in the development and subsequent improvement ofchemical processes for the design, synthesis and operation. The optimizationproblem has often been cast as multi-objective decision-making problem reflectingan increasing awareness of the environmental and sustainable aspects inaddition to process e...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Currently, biofiltration has become a viable and potential alternative for the treatment of airstreams with low concentrations of hydrophobic volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can employ to this end, diverse microorganisms (such as, bacteria, fungal or microbial consortia, etc.) growing a biofilm. Usually, the design, analysis and scale-up o...
Article
Reliable production of biofuels and specifically bioethanol has attracted a significant amount of research recently. Within this context, this study deals with dynamic simulation of bioethanol production processes and in particular aims at developing a mathematical model for describing simultaneous saccharification and co-fermentation (SSCF) of C6...
Article
Full-text available
In this work, optimization of fed-batch operation of cellulose hydrolysis process is studied. To this end, three different feedback (PI) control strategies were developed and evaluated using first-principles model of the hydrolysis process. To ensure the fitness of the model to this purpose (i.e. as a test-bed for controllers), a previously calibra...
Article
Full-text available
The objective of this paper is to present a virtual laboratory for chemical product-process design (virtual PPD-lab) as a tool for the design and analysis of formulations. With the virtual PPD-lab, users can test their design ideas on model-based computer-aided tools before performing experiments to validate the designed product; also, manifold pro...
Article
The objective of this paper is to present a virtual laboratory for chemical productprocess design (virtual PPD-lab) where users can test their design ideas on model-based computer-aided tools before performing experiments to validate the designed product. Design alternatives for products and processes matching a priori defined targets can be genera...
Conference Paper
Integrated chemical product and process design is that branch of science that generates and screens a large number of products in order to find a feasible candidate matching the a-priori set criteria, and then it designs a process that can manufacture the product for the specified qualities. The candidate may be a single chemical, a mixture, or a f...
Article
Full-text available
The objective of this paper is to present a novel computer-aided model-based framework for product-process design that also includes multiscale modelling features. To develop this framework, a combination of different computational tools, such as, property prediction packages, modelling tools, simulation engines, solvent selection software, etc, ar...
Conference Paper
In design of chemical products and the processes that can make them, one first tries to find a candidate product that exhibits certain desirable or targeted behavior and then tries to find a process that can manufacture it with the specified qualities. The candidate may be a single chemical, a mixture, or a formulation of active ingredients and add...
Article
Full-text available
Computer-aided design, analysis and/or operation of chemical products and processes that manufacture them require a number of computational tools. As these tools may come from different sources and disciplines, an important issue is how they can be used simultaneously and efficiently for the design, analysis and/or simulation of a specific process-...
Article
Chemical processes are generally modeled through monoscale approaches, which, while not adequate, satisfy a useful role in product-process design. In this case, use of a multi-dimensional and multi-scale model-based approach has importance in product-process development. A computer-aided framework for model generation, analysis, solution and implem...

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