From pre-treatment toward inter-treatment. Getting some clues from sewage sludge biomethanation

The conventional application of thermal pretreatment of sewage sludge has been to apply it prior to the anaerobic digestion. In this study, the thermal treatment of the digestate was assessed at lab-scale under several temperature and time conditions. Biochemical methane potential (BMP) tests were set up to evaluate the methane production kinetic by using the Gompertz modified and the first order equation. A full-scale digester evaluation was done by using the ADM1 model under different scenarios and by using the parameters drawn from the BMP tests. The best results were obtained at 180°C and 200°C both at 30min where an improvement of 50% in the methane yield in regards to raw digestate. Full-scale simulations show that a scenario with two anaerobic reactors with thermal inter-treatment would improve the methane production by 45% and 20% compared to conventional anaerobic digestion and pretreatments followed by anaerobic digestion, respectively.