Anaerobic Treatment Processes
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Index
An Discussion of AD Processes
There are a great many different anaerobic treatment processes and new proprietary variants are being developed almost monthly.
The longest established anaerobic treatment processes include:-
The above emerge in process designs, when developed and offered by the technology providers, which are either optimised to:
- efficiently remove material (mostly organic) from liquid streams to permit discharge of a treated effluent to a specified water quality standard, and biogas production may be just incidental
- or
- to provide treatment of an MSW to make it suitable for diversion away from landfill, with biogas generation optimised for revenue creation, and potential sales of fibrous, and liquid fertiliser by-products.
We have separated our technology pages into two categories
For example, technology providers such as Linde (Germany) have developed the dry anaerobic digestion process, solely for the processing of MSW.
There are always exceptions to the rule, and a recent and innovative UK system (by Portagester) is probably one such. This system separates the initial digestion stage from the final stage which takes place in a traditional type tower digester, by using portable reactors which are trailer or skip mounted units for the first stage, followed by a static AD reactor stage. We understand that the Portagester can also be used for both agricultural and MSW applications.
CAMBI (Norway) have one of the most sophisticated Anaerobic Digestion processes, as it includes and initial hydrolysis stage as reviewed on our CAMBI process page.
We plan to add to this web site details of the various types of processes and describe them along with their typical design loadings and treatment process capabilities, over a period of time.
A discussed above, the above processes mostly comprise (liquid) processes for the treatment of general organic contaminants, however, other processes are used to optimise specific chemical removal, such as the anaerobic suspended growth processes associated with biological phosphorus removal.
The anaerobic digestion of sludge is another use of anaerobic treatment processes, and historically in the UK and possibly world-wide, the anaerobic digestion of sewage sludge has been the largest market.
However, on-farm anaerobic sludge digestion mostly of animal excreta as slurries has been carried out for many years, although it has not been common to see these plants until more started being built in recent times, due to beneficial ROCs payments etc.
Finally, in any list of anaerobic treatment processes, the humble home or community anaerobic digesters used in increasingly large numbers in China and India particularly must be featured, These low-tech digesters often provide their owners with direct use of the gas produced in the local homes for cooking and sometimes heating, must comprise a very important process.
Before considering the individual anaerobic treatment processes, it will be helpful to consider the reasons for the use of anaerobic treatment processes. More..
See also our UASB page here and our ArrowBio Process page here.
Last of all, we include here the Dranco Process: Dry Process AD for MSW .
AD Technology Selection
There is an excellent free downloadable presentation from a TUHH, Department of Waste Management Workshop in Anaerobic Digestion and Production of Biogas, Prof. Dr.-Ing. R. Stegmann, Dipl.-Ing. Olaf Bade, Chimatra Workshop 2005, which contains many valuable slides.
One if these slides, see below, classifies anaerobic fermentation between wet and dry process, single and two stage, and lists main European providers.
We cannot be sure for how long the presentation will be available online, but while it is click here.
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