Effects of thermal pretreatment and biotin supplementation on the anaerobic digestion of pineapple (Ananas comosus) wastes, kinetics of methane production, and statistical analysis

Abstract

The anaerobic digestion (AD) of pineapple wastes (PW) was employed to understand the effects of design parameters, namely thermal pretreatment (TP) temperature (X1) and reaction time (X2), and biotin concentration (X3), to methane production. Kinetic parameters were evaluated by utilizing sigmoidal growth functions, whereas modified Gompertz (MGM) and Logistic function (LF) best described the system among all batch assays. Principal components analysis (PCA) and Pearson correlation matrix were used to understand the correlation and relationship between the design parameters, evaluated kinetic parameters, methane yield (Y), and process performance parameters, wherein it was found that the significantly statistical correlations were Rm-A, λ-X1, A-Y, A-%VS reduction, A-%pH change, Rm-Y, Y-%VS reduction, Y-%pH change, and %VS reduction-%pH change. Furthermore, the cumulative methane production profile in all reactors showed an increase of 19.2–169.2 % in Y compared to the control, suggesting that TP and biotin supplementation were suitable for the optimization of Y from the AD of PW. The Y among all reactors followed the order of A0 <A1 <A2 <A4 <A7 <A3 <A5 <A8 <A6 wherein the lowest Y from pretreated PW was observed at A1 (77.6478 mL/gVS), while the highest was recorded at A6 (175.3053 mL/gVS). The ANOVA results demonstrated that the contribution of main and interaction parameters to Y (X3 >X1X3 >X2X3 >X1 >X2 >X1X2) were statistically significant (p < 0.05), and therefore relevant in the microbial syntrophies during the AD of PW. From the regression analysis, a surrogate mathematical model was constructed with a goodness of fit R2adj= 0.998. Herein, the optimum design conditions in the methane production from AD of PW were found to be X1 = 80ºC, X2 = 120 min, and X3 = 0.25 mg/L.