Intensification and Monitoring of Anaerobic Fermentation of Sewage Sludge from the Meat Industry

Abstract

Anaerobic digestion is a complex process, and the right quality of feedstock is essential for its proper completion. Although, meat industry wastewater is not ideal feedstock for biogas production, its properties can be improved by pre-treatments. In our chosen pre-treatments, we added magnetite nanoparticles to the sludge and then irradiated it with microwaves at different power levels. Monitoring the fermentation is crucial, especially in industrial practice. We monitored the progress by measuring the dielectric properties of the sludge samples. Our results show that dielectric measurements are a promising alternative for monitoring the anaerobic fermentation because there is a clear correlation between the changes in the value of the dielectric constant and the progression of the fermentation. Our results also clearly support the positive effect of the chosen pretreatments on the amount of biogas produced during fermentation. While the amount of gas increased, the methane content of the biogas produced did not change as verified by gas analysis.