Abstract
Anaerobic digestion is an effective method for treating decanter cake in the biogas production. Decanter cake usage is limited by its slow fiber degradation for anaerobic digestion process. The aim of this study is to study the possibility of using microwave pretreatment to enhance decanter cake digestibility. The power and heating time are the parameters that influence the biogas production and methane yield. The Biochemical Methane Potential (BMP) tests are used in this study to find the optimization setting of a microwave pretreatment for decanter cake solubilization and anaerobic digestibility. The results show that the microwave pretreatment provides a better performance in terms of COD solubilization and anaerobic digestibility. The increasing power and heating time can improve the biogas production and methane yield for microwave pretreated decanter cake under anaerobic digestion process. Finally, the optimum power and heating time used in the microwave pretreatment, found in this study, is 160 watts and 8 min for methane yield under the anaerobic digestion process. The highest methane yield is 309.9 mL CH4/g COD removed. The microwave pretreated decanter cake at 160 watts of power and 8 min of heating time can improve the methane yield with an improvement of 24.6% in comparison with the non-microwave pretreated decanter cake. It can be concluded that the microwave pretreatment of decanter cake from palm oil mill factory could be the rapid and environmental method for biogas production enhancement.
Highlights
Anaerobic digestion of organic wastes has been established due to the increasing investments in renewable energy production and in greenhouse gas emission reduction
The results show that the decanter cake structure is destroyed by the microwave pretreatment process
The increasing of heating power and heating time for microwave pretreatment process of decanter cake can improve the biogas production and the methane yield
Summary
Anaerobic digestion of organic wastes has been established due to the increasing investments in renewable energy production and in greenhouse gas emission reduction. In the southern of Thailand, many biogas plants have been established by combining wastes from agriculture, agro-industry, industry and households for biogas. Fertilizer production is another product from such wastes which are recycled back on farmland and forestland. Biogas is produced from the biochemical breakdown of organic substrates by microorganisms in the absence of oxygen from the anaerobic digestion (Appels et al, 2011; Vergara-Fernández et al, 2008; Brennan and Owende, 2010; Rakmak et al, 2010). Anaerobic co-digestion is an anaerobic digestion with two or more substrates for improving the economic viability of anaerobic digestion plants due to higher methane production (Mata-Alvarez et al, 2000)
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