Anaerobic digestion of banana winery effluent for biogas production

Abstract

he efficiency of banana winery effluent (BWE) in biogas production through improving fermentation process was investigated in this study. The study was conducted in a batch system under mesophilic temperature of 35oC achieved by using controlled thermostat waterbath. Two sets of experiments (labeled as experiment 1 and experiment 2) with five reactors each, were performed in the laboratory. For experiment 1, reactor A was treated as a control with no addition of urea while 1g,2g,3g and 4g of urea were added in reactors B,C,D and E respectively. For experiment 2, different amount of sucrose, that is 0.18g, 0.27g, 0.36g and 0.44g were added in the reactors B, C, D and E correspondingly, and reactor A without sucrose addition was used as the control .Results for experiment 1 revealed that reactor A produced largest volume of biogas (1.93L) followed by reactor B with least amount of urea where 1.37L of biogas was generated. Other reactors produced smaller volume of biogas during the study period. For experiment 2 results indicated large volume of biogas (2.72L) was produced in reactor C with 0.27g of sucrose followed by reactor D (2.71L) with 0.36g sucrose. The biogas produced contained 68.9% - 74.6% methane (CH4). This study concluded that addition of nitrogen source does not increase biogas production from Banana winery effluent while addition of carbon source is important as a source of energy for enhancing C: N ratio for process stability and biogas production.