Kinetic analysis of mud insulation's impact on fixed dome biogas digester performance

Abstract

Kinetic analysis of performance of mud insulated fixed dome biodigester was done. The performance evaluation of the digesters was done with different feedstocks. Mud insulated digesters with cow abdominal waste (CAW), poultry droppings (PD) and 1:1 CAW & PD were labelled as 1, 2 and 3 respectively while uninsulated digesters with CAW, PD and 1:1 CAW & PD were labelled as 4, 5 and 6 respectively. The methane yield(mlCH4/gCOD) were 20123.25, 17688.36, 13688.61, 8690.42, 17239.66, and 14277.06 for digesters 1,2,3,4,5 and 6 respectively. The percentage compositions of methane component according to the GC results were 77.37%, 72.84%, 61.43%, 61.79%, 57.74% and 59.24% respectively for digesters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 respectively, indicating that the methane components of mud insulated fixed dome biogas digester were generally higher than that of the uninsulated fixed dome digesters. The Gompertz model gave the best fit to experimental data with R 2 =0.995.