All issues

The paper presents a mathematical model that describes the process of obtaining biogas from livestock waste. This model describes the processes occurring in a biogas plant for mesophilic and thermophilic media, as well as for continuous and periodic modes of substrate inflow. The values of the coefficients of this model found earlier for the periodic mode, obtained by solving the problem of model identification from experimental data using a genetic algorithm, are given.

For the model of methanogenesis, an optimal control problem is formulated in the form of a Lagrange problem, whose criterial functionality is the output of biogas over a certain period of time. The controlling parameter of the task is the rate of substrate entry into the biogas plant. An algorithm for solving this problem is proposed, based on the numerical implementation of the Pontryagin maximum principle. In this case, a hybrid genetic algorithm with an additional search in the vicinity of the best solution using the method of conjugate gradients was used as an optimization method. This numerical method for solving an optimal control problem is universal and applicable to a wide class of mathematical models.

In the course of the study, various modes of submission of the substrate to the digesters, temperature environments and types of raw materials were analyzed. It is shown that the rate of biogas production in the continuous feed mode is 1.4–1.9 times higher in the mesophilic medium (1.9–3.2 in the thermophilic medium) than in the periodic mode over the period of complete fermentation, which is associated with a higher feed rate of the substrate and a greater concentration of nutrients in the substrate. However, the yield of biogas during the period of complete fermentation with a periodic mode is twice as high as the output over the period of a complete change of the substrate in the methane tank at a continuous mode, which means incomplete processing of the substrate in the second case. The rate of biogas formation for a thermophilic medium in continuous mode and the optimal rate of supply of raw materials is three times higher than for a mesophilic medium. Comparison of biogas output for various types of raw materials shows that the highest biogas output is observed for waste poultry farms, the least — for cattle farms waste, which is associated with the nutrient content in a unit of substrate of each type.

This paper formulates and solves a practical problem of data recovery regarding the distribution of languages on regional level in context of China. The necessity of this recovery is related to the problem of the determination of the linguistic diversity indices, which, in turn, are used to analyze empirically and to predict sources of social and economic development as well as to indicate potential conflicts at regional level. We use Ethnologue database and China census as the initial data sources. For every language spoken in China, the data contains (a) an estimate of China residents who claim this language to be their mother tongue, and (b) indicators of the presence of such residents in China provinces. For each pair language/province, we aim to estimate the number of the province inhabitants that claim the language to be their mother tongue. This base problem is reduced to solving an undetermined system of algebraic equations. Given additional restriction that Ethnologue database introduces data collected at different time moments because of gaps in Ethnologue language surveys and accompanying data collection expenses, we relate those data to a single time moment, that turns the initial task to an ’ill-posed’ system of algebraic equations with imprecisely determined right hand side. Therefore, we are looking for an approximate solution characterized by a minimal discrepancy of the system. Since some languages are much less distributed than the others, we minimize the weighted discrepancy, introducing weights that are inverse to the right hand side elements of the equations. This definition of discrepancy allows to recover the required variables. More than 92% of the recovered variables are robust to probabilistic modelling procedure for potential errors in initial data.