Biorefining of sugar-beet processing wastes by anaerobic biotechnology: waste stabilization and bioproduct formation

Date

2008

Author

Alkaya, Emrah

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The main objective of this study was to investigate two of the possible exploitation routes of anaerobic digestion (acid-phase and methane-phase) for the treatment of sugar-beet processing wastes, while producing valuable biobased products. For this purpose, four sets of laboratory experiments were carried out in a stepwise fashion: First, in the biochemical methane potential (BMP) assay (Set-up 1) wastewater and beet-pulp were efficiently digested (63.787.3% COD removal and 69.689.3% VS reduction) in batch anaerobic reactors. Secondly, wastewater and beet-pulp could simultaneously be converted to VFAs in acidogenic anaerobic reactors with considerable acidification degrees (43.852.9%), optimizing the operational conditions (Set-up 2). Then, the produced VFAs were recovered by liquid-liquid extraction (Set-up 3), in which highest VFA recoveries (60.797.6%) were observed at 20% trioctylphosphine oxide (TOPO) in kerosene with KD values ranging between 1.54 and 40.79 at pH 2.5. Finally, methane-phase anaerobic digestion was evaluated in two different reactor configurations, namely fed-batch continuously mixed reactor (FCMR) and anaerobic sequencing batch reactor (ASBR) (Set-up 4). Methane production yield of 255 ± 11 mL/g COD-added was increased to 337 ± 15 mL/g COD-added (32.2% increase in methane yield) when configuration was changed from FCMR to ASBR. In addition, tCOD removal was increased from 68.7 ± 2.2 to 79.7 ± 1.1%. Based on the result obtained in this study, it is postulated that, biorefining of sugar-beet processing wastes by anaerobic digestion can not only be a solution for environmental related problems, but also contribute to resource conservation.

Subject Keywords

Environmental engineering., Environmental protection.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12609791/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/17773

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis