Anaerobic Digestion of Wastewater Sludge and Alkaline-Pretreated Wheat Straw at Semi-Continuous Pilot Scale: Performances and Energy Assessment

During the last decade, application of pretreatment has been investigated to enhance methane production from lignocellulosic biomass such as wheat straw (WS). Nonetheless, most these studies were conducted in laboratory batch tests, potentially hiding instability problems or inhibition, which may fail truly predicting full-scale reactor performance. For this purpose, effect an alkaline on process performance and yields WS (0.10 g NaOH g?1 at 90 °C for 1 h) co-digested with fresh wastewater sludge was evaluated a pilot-scale (20 L). Results showed that resulted better delignification (44%) hemicellulose solubilization (62%) compared untreated WS. Pilot-scale study improved (261 ± 3 Nm3 CH4 t?1 VS) (201 6 VS). Stable without any inhibition observed high alkalinity maintained due used pretreatment. The thus confirms is promising technology could improve overall economic benefits biogas plant 24 EUR VS treated, energy recovery per unit organic matter, reduce digestate volume its disposal costs.