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Start-up and operation strategies on the liquefied food waste anaerobic digestion and a full-scale case application

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Abstract

Batch anaerobic digestion was employed to investigate the efficient start-up strategies for the liquefied food waste, and sequencing batch digestion was also performed to determine maximum influent organic loading rate (OLR) for efficient and stable operation. The results indicated that the start-up could be well improved using appropriate wastewater organic load and food-to-microorganism ratios (F/M). When digestion was initialized at low chemical oxygen demand (COD) concentration of 20.0 gCOD L−1, the start-up would go well using lower F/M ratio of 0.5–0.7. The OLR 7.0 gCOD L−1 day−1 was recommended for operating the ASBR digestion, in which the COD conversion of 96.7 ± 0.53 % and biomethane yield of 3.5 ± 0.2 L gCOD−1 were achieved, respectively. The instability would occur when OLR was higher than 7.0 gCOD L−1 day−1, and this instability was not recoverable. Lipid was suggested to be removed before anaerobic digestion. The anaerobic digestion process in engineering project ran well, and good performance was achieved when the start-up and operational strategies from laboratory study were applied. For case application, stable digestion performance was achieved in a digester (850 m3 volume) with biogas production of 1.0–3.8 m3 m−3 day−1.

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Acknowledgments

We gave our appreciations to the financial supports from Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral program of Higher Education (20120010110004) and Beijing Natural Science Foundation (8142030).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Resource and Environmental Research, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, 15 Beisanhuan East Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100029, People’s Republic of China

    Ying Meng, Fei Shen, Hairong Yuan, Dexun Zou, Yanping Liu, Baoning Zhu, Akiber Chufo, Muhammad Jaffar & Xiujin Li

  2. Institute of Ecological and Environmental Sciences, Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, 611130, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China

    Fei Shen

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  1. Ying Meng
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  2. Fei Shen
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  5. Yanping Liu
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  9. Xiujin Li
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Correspondence to Xiujin Li.

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Meng, Y., Shen, F., Yuan, H. et al. Start-up and operation strategies on the liquefied food waste anaerobic digestion and a full-scale case application. Bioprocess Biosyst Eng 37, 2333–2341 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-014-1211-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00449-014-1211-8

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