Hydrogen Production from Kitchen Waste using Heat Treated Anaerobic Biogas Plant Slurry
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| Hydrogen Production Biogas Plant Slurry |
S. Jayalakshmi1, V. Sukumaran2 and Kurian Joseph3
1
Civil Department, Periyar Maniammai College of Technology for Women, Vallam, Thanjavur.
Dept. of Biotechnology, Periyar Maniammai College of Technology for Women, Vallam, Thanjavur
3
Centre for Environmental Studies, Anna University, Gundy, Chennai
Email: j_lak2001@yahoo.co.in
ABSTRACT
Anaerobic digestion of kitchen waste for hydrogen production was performed in lab scale reactors, using heat-treated anaerobically digested biogas plant slurry. The biogas plant slurry was given heat treatment at varying temperatures ranging from 70oC to 100 oC for 15 minutes.The reactor operated with 100 oC heat-treated inoculum was efficient in hydrogen production from kitchen waste. The rate of hydrogen production was 176.2 mL/kg TS/ h. Methane was not reported in all the operated reactors except that the reactor operated with 70 oC heat-treated inoculum. The hydrogen concentration was found to be 55-60% and the remaining was CO2. Normal butyrate was the main acid product, and the percentages of butyrate, acetate and propionate at tested conditions were 45 – 50 %, 20 – 25% and 20 – 25% respectively.
Keywords: Anaerobic Digestion, Kitchen Waste, Heat-treated inoculum, Hydrogen gas
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Hydrogen is a promising alternate to fossil fuels due to its clean and high-energy potential. Anaerobic Digestion of organic waste produces various volatile fatty acids (VFA), H2, CO2 and other intermediates (Rustrian et al 1999). The reactions involved in hydrogen production are rapid and making them useful for treating large quantities of organic wastes. Hydrogen gas is not the only beneficial energy source, but also VFA can be used for methane production by methanogenes (Llabres et al, 1999). Acidification of organic wastes, however, needs hydraulic retention time (HRT) longer than 3 days in which hydrogen consumers such as methanogenes could be multiplied. Because of this reason, most researches on hydrogen production have been carried out under inhibitory condition of hydrogen consumers. In order to inactivate hydrogen consumers, inoculum was cultured with pure chemicals such as glucose or sucrose at short HRT and /or low pH (Fang et al, 2002) or preheated inoculum to harvest spore-forming anaerobic bacteria (Lay et al, 1999). Continuous production of hydrogen was also tried at short HRT to prevent the growth of hydrogen consumers (Mizuno et al,2000). However, there have been no studies on continuous hydrogen production at enough HRT from organic solid wastes. So far, majority of research work has been directed at expensive pure substrates to a much lesser quantity of solid waste (Hawkes et al, 2002). Therefore the aim of this current work was to investigate the feasibility of hydrogen production from kitchen waste using heat-treated
anaerobic biogas plant slurry.
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