Application of ethanol-type fermentation in establishment of direct interspecies electron transfer: A practical engineering case study

Zhiqiang Zhao and Yaobin Zhang

Renewable Energy, 2019, vol. 136, issue C, 846-855

Abstract: A promising strategy for establishing direct interspecies electron transfer (DIET)-based syntrophic metabolism during anaerobic digestion (AD) is to stimulate the methanogenic communities with ethanol to rapidly produce biological electrical connections. In this study the strategy was further explored in an engineering-scale up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor treating bagasse wastes. The results demonstrated that, under the conditions employed, the ethanol-abundant acidogenic products from ethanol-type fermentation could stimulate the UASB reactor to form the aggregates with a higher conductivity (22.6 ± 0.6 uS/cm) than that in the laboratory-scale UASB reactor treating brewery wastes (8.1 ± 1.7 uS/cm), in which DIET was the primary working mode of interspecies electron exchange. Furthermore, these aggregates also presented a positive response with granular active carbon (GAC) to methanogenesis, suggesting that the DIET-based methanogenic communities were established. As a result, the engineering-scale UASB reactor was capable of maintaining stability in response to the environmental disturbance. Microbial community analysis revealed that specific and substantial enrichments of Petrimonas (21.8% of abundance) and Methanothrix species (64.8%) were detected in the aggregates. These results, and the known ability of Petrimonas species to transfer electrons to elemental sulfur, suggested that Petrimonas species might participate in DIET with Methanothrix species.

Keywords: Ethanol-type fermentation; Direct interspecies electron transfer (DIET); Engineering applications; Up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB); Methanogenesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148119300552
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:renene:v:136:y:2019:i:c:p:846-855

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2019.01.055

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().