SIMULATION OF ANAEROBIC DIGESTERS FOR THE NON-UNIFORM LOADING OF BIOWASTE GENERATED FROM AN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

Abstract

The environmental impacts of conventional energy sources and the importance given to renewable energy technologies lead to the use of bio-gas in a number of applications such as power gen-eration, heating and refrigeration. The quantity and quality of biogas depend on the ingredients and their compositions in the biowaste. In this present work, analytical and experimental studies have been con-ducted to predict the generation of methane from the biowastes produced in an educational institution where the availability of biowaste is not uniform throughout an academic year. The Anaerobic Diges-tion Model 1 (ADM1) is used for analytical studies, and four portable anaerobic digesters, manufactured by fibre-reinforced plastic, are used in the experi-mental investigation. The observations show that the biogas produced from the wastes available in the educational institution could substitute 30 to 35% of the conventional cooking energy used inside the campus, and average methane contents in the biogas produced from cow dung, rice waste, mixed rice waste and vegetable waste are 58.01 %, 51.96 %, 54.85 %, and 52.28 % respectively. It is also ob-served that the yield and the quality of biogas are influenced by the uniformity in organic loading.