Hafner Consulting LLC

Welcome

I work on science and engineering problems in a variety of areas related to the environment, and have been doing consulting work since 2012. Feel free to browse projects and papers, or contact me with questions, to join a mailing list, or to discuss a potential project. I'm also active on ResearchGate.

- Sasha D. Hafner, Ph.D.

Updates

Additions to biogas web app OBA (October 2020)

I have made some significant additions to OBA recently, including an option to apply the Standard BMP Methods validation criteria, and to predict BMP of food products based on nutrition facts (based on Konrad Koch's great idea for alternative positive controls--see paper 46). Find OBA at https://biotransformers.shinyapps.io/oba1. For regular updates, send a message to join the mailing list.

International Inter-laboratory Study on BMP (IIS-BMP): final results available (June 2020)

Check out the results from a large international effort to standardize measurement of biochemical methane potential (BMP) in a new open-access paper.

This project, funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, cut through the muddle of inaccurate BMP testing through generation and careful analysis of a large and detailed inter-laboratory dataset. The recommendations that came out of this work are a central component of the new Standard BMP Methods website, and have the potential to substantially improve inter-laboratory reproducibility.

New simple (but accurate) method for measurement of biochemical methane potential (BMP) (November 2019)

This method has been in the works for years (I first started working on the concept during my PhD at Cornell in Bill Jewell's lab), but was always on a back burner. Some hard-working MSc students at Aarhus University and collaborators at TUM, UQ, and DBFZ helped make it happen. With this new gas density BMP (GD-BMP) method, BMP can be be accurately measured with even the most basic laboratory equipment.

The method has now been tested in three labs and compared to measurements made in two others using a state-of-the-art method (AMPTS II). For details, see this open-access paper. To use the method, check out the detailed documents on measurements and calculations on the Standard BMP Methods website (available in English and Spanish).