EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Integration of Hydrothermal Carbonisation with Anaerobic Digestion; Opportunities for Valorisation of Digestate

Kiran R. Parmar and Andrew B. Ross
Additional contact information
Kiran R. Parmar: Centre for Integrated Energy Research, School of Chemical and Process Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK
Andrew B. Ross: Centre for Integrated Energy Research, School of Chemical and Process Engineering, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 9, 1-17

Abstract: Hydrothermal carbonisation (HTC) has been identified as a potential route for digestate enhancement producing a solid hydrochar and a process water rich in organic carbon. This study compares the treatment of four dissimilar digestates from anaerobic digestion (AD) of agricultural residue (AGR); sewage sludge (SS); residual municipal solid waste (MSW), and vegetable, garden, and fruit waste (VGF). HTC experiments were performed at 150, 200 and 250 °C for 1 h using 10%, 20%, and 30% solid loadings of a fixed water mass. The effect of temperature and solid loading to the properties of biocoal and biochemical methane potential (BMP) of process waters are investigated. Results show that the behaviour of digestate during HTC is feedstock dependent and the hydrochar produced is a poor-quality solid fuel. The AGR digestate produced the greatest higher heating value (HHV) of 24 MJ/kg, however its biocoal properties are poor due to slagging and fouling propensities. The SS digestate process water produced the highest amount of biogas at 200 °C and 30% solid loading. This study concludes that solely treating digestate via HTC enhances biogas production and that hydrochar be investigated for its use as a soil amender.

Keywords: hydrothermal carbonisation (HTC); anaerobic digestion (AD); waste management; biorefinery; digestate; pyrolysis; hydrochar; slagging and fouling; biogas (BMP); biodegradability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/9/1586/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/12/9/1586/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:12:y:2019:i:9:p:1586-:d:226042

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager (indexing@mdpi.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:gam:jeners:v:12:y:2019:i:9:p:1586-:d:226042