Impact of Treatment Strategies on Biohydrogen Production from Waste‐Activated Sludge Fermentation

Abstract

Hydrogen production using waste activated sludge (WAS) is a less energy intensive, more economical, sustainable and a promising technique that offers many advantages over conventional method of production using fossil fuel. Annual generation of large amount of WAS from water treatment plants makes it a suitable source and has attracted many researchers to focus attention on its utilization for large-scale production of hydrogen. Many physical and chemical WAS pretreatment methods such as thermal, ultrasonication, irradiation, centrifugation and chemical addition are adopted for enhancing the hydrogen yield. This review covers available methods and mechanism for the production of hydrogen using WAS. Summarization of various pretreatments techniques, adopted by varous researchers to recover energy from abundantly available WAS, are presented.