Modeling Lab-sized Anaerobic Fluidized Bed Reactor (AFBR) for Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) treatment: from Batch to Continuous Reactors

Abstract

Indonesia is aiming to produce 30 million tones/year of crude palm oil (CPO) by 2020. As a result, 90 million tones/year of POME will be produced. POME is highly polluting wastewater which may cause severe environmental problem due to its high chemical oxygen demand (COD) and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD). Due to the limitation of open pond treatment, the use of AFBR has been considered as a potential technology to treat POME. This study aims to develop mathematical models of lab-sized Anaerobic Fluidized Bed Reactor (AFBR) in batch and continuous processes. In addition, the AFBR also utilized natural zeolite as an immobilized media for microbes. To initiate the biomass growth, biodiesel waste has been used as an inoculum. In the first part of this study, a batch AFBR was operated to evaluate the COD, VFA, and CH4 concentrations. By comparing the batch results with and without zeolite, it showed that the addition of 17 g/gSCOD zeolite gave larger COD decrease within 20 days of operation. In order to elucidate the mechanism, parameter estimations of 12 kinetic parameters were proposed to describe the batch reactor performance. The model in general could describe the batch experimental data well. In the second part of this study, the kinetic parameters obtained from batch reactor were used to simulate the performance of double column AFBR where the acidogenic and methanogenic biomass were separated. The simulation showed that a relatively long residence time (Hydraulic Residence Time, HRT) was required to treat POME using the proposed double column AFBR. Sensitivity analyses was conducted and revealed that μm1 appeared to be the most sensitive parameter to reduce the HRT of double column AFBR.