Optimization of Water Content Fluctuation During Biomethanation of OFMSW in Presence of Waste Plastics

Abstract

The objective of the present study is to find the effect of water content fluctuation during the biomethanation process with the physical presence of waste plastics on the biodegradation of organic fraction of municipal solid wastes (OFMSW) which can enhance the biogas production rate. The focal point of this article is how the presence of waste plastics inside the waste beds may increase the void spaces of the waste bed which can enhance the leachate hold up inside the waste bed with higher retention time. During this biomethanation process in landfill, lots of process parameters are fluctuating. The present work therefore emphases on the optimization of nominated process constraints for the effective production of biogas by using response surface methodology (RSM) and observes the effect of fluctuation on the biogas yield. Organic waste and waste plastics (WP) are using as the main components of this process. The waste plastics which is used here is basically polyethylene (PE) bags. The selected process parameters are considered as the controlling factors for this optimization process. 5% fluctuation of water content (WC) is added with the predefined outcome, and then, again RSM using rotatable central composite design (RCCD) is carried out with three factors waste plastic (WP), water content (WC) and digestion time (DT) which are optimized to evaluate their effect on enhanced biogas yield. The optimized outcome with the enhanced biogas production 12.7575 m3/ton of organic waste is obtained with WP (15%), WC (150 mL) and DT (17 weeks) by analysing various experimental data. A correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.9818, resulting from ANOVA, specified high degree of interaction between the variables.