New Pretreatment Approaches To Increase Efficiency Of Anaerobic Digesters

Conventional AD requires highly-controlled operational parameters (temperature, pH, mixing, minimal wastewater variation) and nutrient dosing to efficiently treat wastewater and produce meaningful methane. Any change in the production process or ingredients can lead to changes in wastewater that may create toxicity events in the digester. All of these factors may result in many AD systems not achieving the initial design objectives. BioElectrochemical approaches, such as Aquacycl’s BioElectrochemical Treatment Technology (BETT™) can act as industrial pretreatment to make AD significantly more efficient and reliable. BioElectrochemical systems (BESs) are anaerobic technologies that use naturally existing bacteria, and their ability to generate electrical currents, to accelerate the hydrolysis of complex carbon sources and enhance fermentation rates to generate the smaller volatile fatty acids that methanogens prefer. As a pretreatment step, BESs normalize the AD feedstock, reducing adverse impacts of production variability, pH, and temperature.