All over the world there is a strong interest and also potential for biogas production from organic residues as well as from different crops. However, to be commercially competitive with other types of fuels, efficiency improvements of the biogas production process are needed. In this paper, results of improvements studies done on a full scale co-digestion plant are presented In the plant organic wastes from households and restaurants are mixed and digested with crops from graze land. The areas for improvements of the plant addressed are treatment of the feed material to enhance the digestion rate, limitation of the ballast of organics in the water stream recirculated in the process, and use of the biogas plant residues at farms. Results from previous studies on pre-treatment and membrane filtration of recirculated process water are combined for estimation of the total improvement potential. Further, the possibility to use neural networks to predict biogas production using historical data from the full-scale biogas plant was investigated. Results from investigation of using the process residues as fertilizer are also presented.The results indicates a potential to increase the biogas yield from the process with up to over 30 % with pre-treatment of the feed and including membrane filtration in the process. Neural networks have the potential to be used for prediction of biogas production. Further, it is shown that the residues from biogas production can be used as fertilizers but that the emission of N 2 O from the fertilised soil is dependent on the soil type and spreading technology.
Exploiting the full biogas potential of some types of biomass is challenging. The complex structures of lignocellulosic biomass are difficult to break down and thus require longer retention times for the nutrients to become biologically available. It is possible to increase the digestibility of the substrate by pre-treating the material before digestion. This paper explores a pre-treatment of ley crop silage that uses electrical fields, known as electroporation (EP). Different settings of the EP equipment were tested, and the results were analyzed using a batch digestion setup. The results show that it is possible to increase the biogas yield with 16 % by subjecting the substrates to 65 pulses at a field strength of 96 kV/cm corresponding to a total energy input of 259 Wh/kg volatile solid (VS). However, at 100 pulses, a lower field strength of 48 kV/cm and the same total energy input, no effects of the treatment were observed. The energy balance of the EP treatment suggests that the yield, in the form of methane, can be up to double the electrical energy input of the process.
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