Comparative Kinetic Study of Anaerobic Treatment of Thermally Pretreated Source-Sorted Organic Market Refuse

Abstract EN

The present study deals with extensive investigations of the effect of thermal pretreatment on whole-sale market rejects for their biogas production potential.

Market reject considered as biomass for this study has been treated at two different temperatures 85°C and 135°C for 8 h each and subjected as feedstock for anaerobic digestion (AD) process.

The AD process has been operated in the mesophilic range (35–38°C) of bacterial growth.

Various kinetic models have been used to simulate the experimental data.

Kinetic modeling revealed that biogas production rate exhibited better coefficient of determination ( R 2 ) in the range of 0.973–0.989 with exponential model for the ascending limb whereas the descending limb resulted in good linear correlation with R 2 as 0.911–0.976.

Logistic growth model and Gompertz relation simulation of cumulative biogas production resulted in better R 2 values in the range of 0.994–0.997 and 0.998–0.999, whereas the R 2 values for exponential rise to maximum plots ranged from 0.722 to 0.800.