A study on microbial activity in mud volcano using connected thermal gradient incubator
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Yeh, Shih-Hung
Abstract
We use a connected thermal gradient incubator to monitor microbial activity in volcano mud. The extracted samples are analyzed by gas chromatography and ion chromatography techniques. We monitor the microbial activity from the physiological species generated by the mud volcano microbes.
The majority mud volcano microbe is a kind of anaerobic bacteria. The incubator must be shielded from the outside environment. The optimized design so far is a hollow metal cylinder with branched sampling holes on the sides. Through the heat transfer simulation and in-situ temperature measurements, we confirmed that the designed incubator can support a steady constant thermal gradient. This design has to be further tested. The current experiments are conducted using testing tubes, which are stuffed with volcano mud, embedded in an iron sand stuffed hollow cylinder incubator, which can support a constant thermal gradient. Seven testing tubes are installed in a constant thermal gradient with temperature spanned from 40 to 60 oC. We analyze the methane and organic acid concentrations at different incubation durations. We discover that the organic acid decomposition rate by the methane bacteria is increased as the incubation temperature increased. This result is different from that obtained by previous incubation experiment performed using separate testing tubes at different temperatures. In conjunction with the experiments performed at fixed temperatures, this experiment method can help us further understand the microbial activity of mud volcano under the influence of thermal gradients.
Subjects
connected thermal gradient incubator
mud volcano
anaerobic bacteria
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-99-R97543027-1.pdf
Size
23.53 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):97d1df65aa0b62fa44227da34e8e2284