Evaluating biomethane production from anaerobic mono- and co-digestion of food waste and floatable oil (FO) skimmed from food waste.

Batch anaerobic digestion was employed to investigate the performance of the floatable oil (FO) skimmed from food waste (FW) and the effect of different FO concentrations (5, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50g/L) on biomethane production and system stability. FO and FO+FW were mono-digested and co-digested. The results showed that FO and FO+FW could be well anaerobically converted to biomethane in appropriate loads. For the mono-digestions of FO, the biomethane yield, TS and VS reduction achieved 607.7-846.9mL/g, 69.7-89% and 84.5-92.8%, respectively, when FO concentration was 5-40g/L. But the mono-digestion appeared instability when FO concentration was 50g/L. For the co-digestions of FW+FO, TS and VS reductions reached 70.7-86.1% and 87.5-91.4%, respectively, when FO concentration was 5-30g/L. However, the inhibition occurred when FO concentrations increased to 40-50g/L. The maximal FO loads of 40g/L and 30g/L were hence suggested for efficient mono-digestions and co-digestions of FO and FO+FW.

Biomethane production and physicochemical characterization of anaerobically digested teff (Eragrostis tef) straw pretreated by sodium hydroxide.

The biogas production potential and biomethane content of teff straw through pretreatment by NaOH was investigated. Different NaOH concentrations (1%, 2%, 4% and 6%) were used for each four solid loadings (50, 65, 80 and 95 g/L). The effects of NaOH as pretreatment factor on the biodegradability of teff straw, changes in main compositions and enhancement of anaerobic digestion were analyzed. The result showed that, using 4% NaOH for pretreatment in 80 g/L solid loading produced 40.0% higher total biogas production and 48.1% higher biomethane content than the untreated sample of teff straw. Investigation of changes in chemical compositions and physical microstructure indicated that there was 4.3-22.1% total lignocellulosic compositions removal after three days pretreatment with NaOH. The results further revealed that NaOH pretreatment changed the structural compositions and lignin network, and improved biogas production from teff straw.

Minimizing asynchronism to improve the performances of anaerobic co-digestion of food waste and corn stover.

To investigate the existence of the asynchronism during the anaerobic co-digestion of different substrates, two typical substrates of food waste and corn stover were anaerobically digested with altering organic loadings (OL). The results indicated that the biodegradability of food waste and corn stover was calculated to be 81.5% and 55.1%, respectively, which was main reason causing the asynchronism in the co-digestion. The asynchronism was minimized by NaOH-pretreatment for corn stover, which could improve the biodegradability by 36.6%. The co-digestion with pretreatment could increase the biomethane yield by 12.2%, 3.2% and 0.6% comparing with the co-digestion without pretreatment at C/N ratios of 20, 25 and 30 at OL of 35 g-VS/L, respectively. The results indicated that the digestibility synchronism of food waste and corn stover was improved through enhancing the accessibility and digestibility of corn stover. The biomethane production could be increased by minimizing the asynchronism of two substrates in co-digestion.

Start-up and operation strategies on the liquefied food waste anaerobic digestion and a full-scale case application.

Batch anaerobic digestion was employed to investigate the efficient start-up strategies for the liquefied food waste, and sequencing batch digestion was also performed to determine maximum influent organic loading rate (OLR) for efficient and stable operation. The results indicated that the start-up could be well improved using appropriate wastewater organic load and food-to-microorganism ratios (F/M). When digestion was initialized at low chemical oxygen demand (COD) concentration of 20.0 gCOD L(-1), the start-up would go well using lower F/M ratio of 0.5-0.7. The OLR 7.0 gCOD L(-1) day(-1) was recommended for operating the ASBR digestion, in which the COD conversion of 96.7 ± 0.53% and biomethane yield of 3.5 ± 0.2 L gCOD(-1) were achieved, respectively. The instability would occur when OLR was higher than 7.0 gCOD L(-1) day(-1), and this instability was not recoverable. Lipid was suggested to be removed before anaerobic digestion. The anaerobic digestion process in engineering project ran well, and good performance was achieved when the start-up and operational strategies from laboratory study were applied. For case application, stable digestion performance was achieved in a digester (850 m(3) volume) with biogas production of 1.0-3.8 m(3) m(-3) day(-1).