Development of the Laboratory Anaerobic Bioreactor for Wet and Dry Digestion Processes

Abstract

This article presents partial results of the laboratory development of an anaerobic bioreactor designed for the physical modelling of (semi)continuous dry or wet anaerobic digestion processes. A horizontal cylindrical tank reactor of 0.4 m3 total capacity has been developed. The reactor allows the continuous stirring of a liquid batch or the intermittent stirring of a solid batch. The bioreactor has been used as a lab-scale digestor in the research project dealing with high-solids (dry) anaerobic co-digestion organic fraction of mixed municipal solid waste. The first experiment was performed on the mixture of MSW with corn silage (1:1) with the weight of 300 kg.

Keywords

• anaerobic digestion
• dry process
• wet process
• physical model
• continuous stirring