Study of Gas Production by Anaerobic Fermentation and Microbial Community Changes by In-Situ Microaerobic Desulphurization

Abstract

The enhancement of biogas quality at low cost and high efficiency process was one of the purposes of biogas engineering. In this work, we designed a reactor for microaerobic desulphurization. We used this reactor to study the anaerobic fermentation in systems that used cow manure with total solid (TS) concentrations of 18.5%, 15% and 10%. The influence of anaerobic fermentation on the stability of gas production and the characteristics of the gas produced with different concentrations of fermentation materials was studied. The strain structure of the fermentation system was obtained by high-throughput sequencing and taxonomy was compared. The H2S removal results showed that the average rates of the H2S removal in concentrations of fermentation materials of 18.5%, 15%, and 10% TS were 99.2%, 97.8%, and 78.8%, respectively. 16SrRNA sequencing was performed in different fermented samples as well as a comparison between samples in order to determine the number of unique species (NUS) and the number of common species (NCS). By comparing TS 18.5 with TS 15 and TS 10 samples, it was determined that under fermentation conditions, NUS were 113 and 106, respectively. Whereas NUS were 31 and 41, respectively, when comparing TS 15 and TS 10. These demonstrated that the number of strain species in the fermentation system with TS 18.5% was far more than those found in the systems with low concentration of fermentation. Also, the ability for disturbance resistance of the microaerobic desulphurization system was stronger at high concentration of the fermentation.