Environmental management: Modelling Plants Nutrients Values During the Composting Process

Abstract

Composting of domestic wastes is one of the natural methods of eliminating foods wastes without damaging the environment. This process provides plants nutrients in the form of hygienic products, similar to mineral-rich soil called agricultural compost. The content of these formed components depends on several factors in the process, such as the humidity, the rejects quantities, their ratios to each other, the type of waste, the composting temperature and the elements interactions during the physico-chemical transformations. The innovation in this study, which remains the essential aim of this work, is to show how the formed essential plants nutrients, such as potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorus, depend not only on the humidity of the environment, the aeration by oxygen and the composition of the domestic wastes, but also on the interaction between them combined with the transformation time. Mathematical modelling using the design of experiments method, revealing that the presence of one element of three in the compost is a function of the two others in time, shows this. The mathematical model showing the variation of composting time as function of the minerals presence in the compost by graphs, contours and response surfaces; they simultaneously interprets the results of this process. One of the final objectives is to estimate by prediction the values of composting days without new experiments.ε