Utilization of food waste and pine needle for generation of methane

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to examine the co-digestion of food waste, cow dung and pine needle. When we discussabout the main problems now days, we come across to the most crucial problem, which is depletion of non-conventional energy sources.Anaerobic digestion of food waste, cow dung and pine needle will not only solve environmental issues but also it emerged as one of the suitable way to generate energy. Besides, anaerobic digestion also helps in reduction in load on landfill sites and reducing risk of wields fires. The substrate are also studied for their physicochemical characteristics, such as pH, Total Solids (TS), Volatile Solid (VS), Total Organic Carbon (TOC), Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen (TKN), and C/N. Three-batch digester AD1, AD2 and AD3 of 45L are used, which consist of cow dung and pine needles. The retention time is 30 day in winter. Apart from that,this thesis includes another study, in which 1L digestersused in order to study difference in methane generation when digesters kept at ambient condition than digesters kept in incubator.Food waste and Pine Needles co-digested in this study. The retention time is 30 days. The initial and final values of change in characteristic of slurry mixture before and after the degradation process for various physiochemical parameter like pH, total solids, volatile solid, temperature, alkalinity, chemical oxygen demand were calculated. The result of this study shows that mixing of pine needle to food waste and cow dung increased the methane generation.