Pretreatment methods to improve sludge anaerobic degradability: a review

This paper presents a review of the main sludge treatment techniques used as a pretreatment to anaerobic digestion. These processes include biological (largely thermal phased anaerobic), thermal hydrolysis, mechanical (such as ultrasound, high pressure and lysis), chemical with oxidation (mainly ozonation), and alkali treatments. The first three are the most widespread. Emphasis is put on their impact on the resulting sludge properties, on the potential biogas (renewable energy) production and on their application at industrial scale. Thermal biological provides a moderate performance increase over mesophilic digestion, with moderate energetic input. Mechanical treatment methods are comparable, and provide moderate performance improvements with moderate electrical input. Thermal hydrolysis provides substantial performance increases, with a substantial consumption of thermal energy. It is likely that low impact pretreatment methods such as mechanical and thermal phased improve speed of degradation, while high impact methods such as thermal hydrolysis or oxidation improve both speed and extent of degradation. While increased nutrient release can be a substantial cost in enhanced sludge destruction, it also offers opportunities to recover nutrients from a concentrated water stream as mineral fertiliser.