| Περίληψη: | It is clear that renewable resources have received great interest from the international community during the last decades and play a crucial role in the current CO2-mitigation policy. In this regard, energy from biomass and waste is seen as one of the most dominant future renewable energy sources. Thus, organic waste i.e. animal wastes, wastewaters, energy crops, agricultural and agro-industrial residues are of specific importance since these sources do not compete with food crops in agricultural land usage. The various technologies that are available for power generation from biomass and waste can be subdivided into thermochemical, biochemical and physicochemical conversion processes. Anaerobic digestion (AD), classified within the biochemical conversion processes, is a robust process and is widely applied. Various types of biomass and waste, can be anaerobically co-digested to generate a homogeneous mixture increasing both process and equipment performance.
This study focused on the valorization of agro-industrial wastes (such as olive mill wastewater (OMW), cheese whey (CW) and liquid cow manure (LCM)) and sweet sorghum stalks. Olive mills, cheese factories and cow farms are agro-industries that represent a considerable share of the worldwide economy with particular interest focused in the Mediterranean region. These industries generate millions of tons of wastewaters and large amounts of by-products, which are in many cases totally unexploited and thus dangerous for the environment. On the other hand, sweet sorghum as a lignocellulosic material represents an interesting substrate for biofuels production due to its structure and composition.
Anaerobic co-digestion experiments using different mixtures of agro-industrial wastes were performed in a two-stage system consisting of two continuously stirred tank reactors (CSTRs) under mesophilic conditions (37°C). Subsequently, more mixtures were studied, where sweet sorghum was added, in order to simulate the operation of a centralized AD plant fed with regional agro-wastes which lacks OMW or/and CW due to seasonal unavailability. Two operational parameters were examined in a two-stage system, including pH and HRT. Batch experiments were performed in order to investigate the impact of controlled pH on the production of bio-hydrogen and volatile fatty acids, whereas continuous experiments (CSTRs) were conducted for the evaluation of HRT effect on hydrogen and methane production.
Moreover, further exploitation of digestate from an anaerobic methanogenic reactor was studied using a combined ultrafiltration/nanofiltration system and further COD reduction was obtained. On the other hand, vermicomposting was conducted in order to evaluate the sludge transformation to compost and as a result, good results in terms of increased N-P-K concentration values were obtained. Furthermore, simulation of mesophilic anaerobic (co)-digestion of different substrates was applied, using the ADM1 modified model, where the results indicated that the modified ADM1 was able to predict reasonably well the steady-state experimental data.
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