No abstract

Leachate recirculation has a profound advantage on biodegradation of the organic fraction of municipal solid waste in landfills. Mature leachate from older sections of landfills (>10 years) and young leachate were blended and added to organic fraction of municipal solid waste in a series of biomethane potential assay experiments with different mixing ratios of mature and young leachate and their effect on biogas production was monitored. The improvement in biogas production was in the range of 19%-41% depending on the ratio of mixing old and new leachate. The results are conclusive that the biogas generation could be improved by blending the old and new leachate in a bioreactor landfill system as compared with a conventional system employed in bioreactor landfills today for recirculating the same age leachate.

Recent environmental concerns have prompted a re-evaluation of conventional management strategies and refueled the search of innovative waste management practices. In this sense, the anaerobic digestion of both fat and the remaining complex organic matter present in dairy wastewaters is attractive, although the continuous operation of high rate anaerobic processes treating this type of wastewaters causes the failure of the process. This work accesses the influence of non-feeding period length on the intermittent operation of mesophilic UASB reactors treating dairy wastewater, in order to allow the biological degradation to catch up with adsorption phenomenon. During the experiments, two UASB reactors were subject to three organic loading rates, ranging from 6 to 12 g(COD) x L(-1) x d(-1), with the same daily load applied to both reactors, each one with a different non-feeding period. Both reactors showed good COD removal efficiencies (87-92%). A material balance for COD in the reactors during the feeding and non-feeding periods showed the importance of the feedless period, which allowed the biomass to degrade substrate that was accumulated during the feeding period. The reactor with the longest non-feeding period had a better performance, which resulted in a higher methane production and adsorption capacity for the same organic load applied with a consequent less accumulation of substrate into the biomass. In addition, both reactors had a stable operation for the organic load of 12 g(COD) x L(-1) x d(-1), which is higher than the maximum applicable load reported in literature for continuous systems (3-6 g(COD) x L(-1) x d(-1)).

Thickened waste-activated sludge (TWAS) was subjected to microwave pretreatment and athermal irradiation. The soluble phase of each type of TWAS pretreatment was subject to ultrafiltration in series using progressively smaller pore-size membranes (300, 100, 10, and 1 kDa) and biodegradability tests. Microwave pretreatment solubilizes a considerable amount of the suspended organic substrate, but athermal irradiation also causes solubilization of organic matter, although at a smaller scale than microwave. Proteins are particularly sensitive to athermal irradiation, and both microwave and athermal irradiation are capable of changing the size distribution of dissolved organic matter. Athermal irradiation and microwave have a substantially different effect on thermophilic anaerobic biodegradability of the various size fractions obtained after ultrafiltration. Slight inhibition and decrease in total biogas production was measured in some microwave tests. Athermal irradiation does not cause a decrease in maximum biogas production rate in any test and increases slightly biogas production.

The IEEE 802.16-2005 (Mobile WiMAX) is a specification of a broadband wireless network intended to support multiple services namely video based services. As of today, despite the standard, in a SISO configuration, specifies bit rates as high as 20 Mbps, our tests showed that the multicast capacity obtained in the urban area was around 6.5 Mbps. Besides, the tested system supports handover. The results also show that WiMAX is able to support mobile services at least up to 140 km/h.