Operational Excellence in a Biogas Plant through Integration of Lean Six Sigma Methodology

Abstract

Process optimization with Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has become more popular every day for years in almost every kind of industry. This integration has brought an even wider variety of possible application areas for industries and research institutes. Recently, the use of LSS for process optimization in biological fields has become more and more common. In this study, LSS methodology is used for process optimization in an industrial scale biogas plant in Hamburg, Germany. The methodology used includes all the DMAIC cycle and related tools. Hypothesis tests were used to calculate the p-value of each experiment for the LSS interpretation. Due to the experimental factors, one-way ANOVA and 1-sample Z-test were used to determine the p-values. By conducting hypothesis testing after the analysis phase of this study, it was found that particle size, freshness of the substrate, and the amount of sand content in the substrate had a significant effect on the desired amount of biogas produced with a p-value of less than 0.01. These root causes led to approaches that focused on high quality feedstock and sufficient pretreatment methods. This paper represents a pioneering example of integrating Lean Six Sigma into biogas plant operation.