Anaerobic digestion of distillery wastewater and napier grass: Characterization and process performance parameters

Abstract

The BOD/COD ratio of napier grass (NG) + distillery wastewater (DWW) was found to be 0.4982, which reflected that the biodegradability of organic material is high and can be degraded and treated efficiently via biological processes. Moreover, further reductions in total solids (TS) and volatile solids (VS) were observed after thermal pretreatment at temperatures of 60°C and 100°C. VS/TS ratio also increased from 0.8767 to 0.9508 indicating a more significant proportion of organic matter are favorable for biogas production. This was evidenced by the resulting removal efficiencies ranging from 15% to 32% and 23% to 42%, for TS and VS, respectively. Overall, the study reported relevant effects of the application of thermochemical pretreatment in the process performance parameters in anaerobic digestion.