Anaerobic mesophilic co-digestion of sugar-beet processing wastewater and beet-pulp in batch reactors

In this study, biochemical methane potential (BMP) assay was conducted to investigate the effect of waste mixing and F/M ratio on the co-digestion of wastewater and beet-pulp, in addition to the digestion of the wastes separately. In the studied F/M range (0.51-2.56 g COD/g VSS), observed treatment efficiencies (63.7-87.3% COD removal and 69.6-89.3% VS reduction) were indications of high biodegradability for both wastewater and beet-pulp, which decreased with increasing F/M. It was evident that the extent of biomethanation of wastewater was higher than beet-pulp, owing to the inherent soluble carbohydrates in wastewater. When the co-digestion of the wastes was evaluated, it came up with the result that, major outcome of wastewater addition was to increase methane production rate of beet-pulp, rather than increasing its ultimate biodegradability. Indeed, modeled first-order rate functions indicated that rate constants (k values) differentiated in the ranges between 0.081 and 0.143 day(-1) and 0.028 -0.050 day(-1) respectively for wastewater added and non-added reactors. These results indicated that anaerobic co-digestion of wastewater and beet-pulp is promising since wastewater addition significantly increases the rate of biomethanation of beet-pulp. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.