Current advances and future outlook on pretreatment techniques to enhance biosolids disintegration and anaerobic digestion: A critical review.

Waste activated sludge (biosolids) treatment is intensely a major problem around the globe. Anaerobic treatment is indeed a fundamental and most popular approach to convert organic wastes into bioenergy, which could be used as a carbon-neutral renewable and clean energy thus eradicating pathogens and eliminating odor. Due to the sheer intricate biosolid matrix (such as exopolymeric substances) and rigid cell structure, hydrolysis becomes a rate-limiting phase. Numerous different pretreatment strategies were proposed to hasten this rate-limiting hydrolysis and enhance the productivity of anaerobic digestion. This study discusses an overview of previous scientific advances in pretreatment options for enhancing biogas production. In addition, the limitations addressed along with the effects of inhibitors in biosolids towards biogas production and strategies to overcome discussed. This review elaborated the cost analysis of various pretreatment methods towards the scale-up process. This review abridges the existing research on augmenting AD efficacy by recognizing the associated knowledge gaps and suggesting future research.

Enhancing aerobic digestion potential of municipal waste-activated sludge through removal of extracellular polymeric substance.

A protease-secreting bacteria was used to pretreat municipal sewage sludge to enhance aerobic digestion. To enhance the accessibility of the sludge to the enzyme, extracellular polymeric substances were removed using citric acid thereby removing the flocs in the sludge. The conditions for the bacterial pretreatment were optimized using response surface methodology. The results of the bacterial pretreatment indicated that the suspended solids reduction was 18% in sludge treated with citric acid and 10% in sludge not treated with citric acid whereas in raw sludge, suspended solids reduction was 5.3%. Solubilization was 10.9% in the sludge with extracellular polymeric substances removed in contrast to that of the sludge with extracellular polymeric substances, which was 7.2%, and that of the raw sludge, which was just 4.8%. The suspended solids reduction in the aerobic reactor containing pretreated sludge was 52.4% whereas that in the control reactor was 15.3%. Thus, pretreatment with the protease-secreting bacteria after the removal of extracellular polymeric substances is a cost-effective and environmentally friendly method.

Solubilization of municipal sewage waste activated sludge by novel lytic bacterial strains.

Extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) are an extracellular matrix found in sludge which plays a crucial role in flocculation by interacting with the organic solids. Therefore, to enhance pretreatment of sludge, EPS have to be removed. In this study, EPS were removed with a chemical extractant, NaOH, to enhance the bacterial pretreatment. A lysozyme secreting bacterial consortium was isolated from the waste activated sludge (WAS). The result of density gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) analysis revealed that the isolated consortium consists of two strains. The two novel strains isolated were named as Jerish03 (NCBI accession number KC597266) and Jerish 04 (NCBI accession number KC597267) and they belong to the genus Bacillus. Pretreatment with these novel strains enhances the efficiency of the aerobic digestion of sludge. Sludge treated with the lysozyme secreting bacterial consortium produced 29 % and 28.5 % increase in suspended solids (SS) reduction and chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal compared to the raw activated sludge (without pretreatment) during aerobic digestion. It is specified that these two novel strains had a high potential to enhance WAS degradation efficiency in aerobic digestion.

Biological pretreatment of non-flocculated sludge augments the biogas production in the anaerobic digestion of the pretreated waste activated sludge.

High-efficiency resource recovery from municipal solid waste (MSW) has been a focus of attention. The objective of this research is to develop a bio-pretreatment process for application prior to the anaerobic digestion of MSW to improve methane productivity. Bacillus licheniformis was used for pretreating MSW (non-flocculated with 0.07% citric acid), followed by anaerobic digestion. Laboratory-scale experiments were carried out in semi-continuous bioreactors, with a total volume of 5 L and working volume of 3 L. Among the nine organic loading rates (OLRs) investigated, the OLR of 0.84 kg SS m(-3) reactor day(-1) was found to be the most appropriate for economic operation of the reactor. Pretreatment of MSW prior to anaerobic digestion led to 55% and 64% increase of suspended solids (SS) and volatile solids reduction, respectively, with an improvement of 57% in biogas production. The results indicate that the pretreatment of non-flocculated sludge with Bacillus licheniformis which consumes less energy compared to other pretreatment techniques could be a cost-effective and environmentally sound method for producing methane from MSW.