K. STAMATELATOU, G. ANTONOPOULOU and G. LYBERATOS, University of Patras, Greece

Abstract: Anaerobic digestion is a biological process that converts the organic matter present in various types of wastes (sewage sludge, agro-industrial wastes, OFMSW, energy crops) into: (1) biogas (rich in methane, suitable to be used for heat and/or electricity generation) (2) biosolids (microorganisms grown on the organic matter and unconverted particulate residues mostly fibres which can be used as soil conditioner), and (3) liquor (dissolved organic matter, recalcitrant to anaerobic degradation and nutrients, which may be used as liquid fertiliser). The vast improvement in various scientific fields (reactor engineering, modelling and control practices, molecular tools) helped to gain a better insight of the process. In addition, the policy to promote biogas utilisation contributed in boosting the application of the anaerobic digestion technology to achieve a two-fold goal: energy production and waste minimisation. All these aspects are discussed in what follows.

Key words: anaerobic digestion, biogas, control, modelling, utilisation.

12.1 Introduction: the anaerobic digestion process

Anaerobic digestion is a biochemical process conducted by the concerted action of a consortium consisting of several groups of microorganisms that degrade the organic matter into a gaseous mixture consisting of methane and carbon dioxide (biogas) in the absence of oxygen. It happens naturally in environments with lack of oxygen such as the bottom of lakes, swamps, the landfills or the intestine of animals. However, the term ‘anaerobic digestion’ usually describes the technology of accelerating the naturally evolved bioprocess in an artificial environment of a closed vessel.

Anaerobic digestion was first applied in the tenth century bc for heating bath water in Assyria. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a flammable gas mixture produced was correlated with the decay of organic matter and, moreover, the correlation became quantitative; the more organic matter is decayed, the more flammable gas is produced. It was in 1808, when Sir Humphrey Davy discovered that methane was a constituent of the gas produced by cattle manure. The anaerobic technology was first demonstrated in Bombay, India, in 1859, by building an anaerobic digester (Meynell, 1976). The biogas recovered from a sewage treatment plant was used to fuel street lamps in Exeter, England, in 1895 (McCabe, 1957). The development of microbiology science in the 1930s brought up further improvement in the anaerobic technology through identification of the anaerobic bacteria, and the conditions favouring the process efficiency and the limitations (Buswell and Hatfield, 1936). Since then, numerous anaerobic applications have been developed worldwide, mainly in the field of waste treatment, but also in manufacturing of chemicals, fibres, food, etc.