Energy Recovery From Food Waste
Project number:
21091
Sponsor:
UA Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering
Academic year:
2020-2021
Project Goal: Using environmentally friendly options, design, produce and recover energy from food waste in Denver, Colorado.
Fossil fuel-generated electric power leads to increases in greenhouse emissions. Anaerobic digestion is an environmentally friendly process that produces methane, which can be used as fuel to help decrease greenhouse emissions.
In this design, food waste is purified in a separation process and combined with manure to enrich the organic matter. Then the anaerobic digestion process uses two reactors to maintain stability, one that handles the hydrolysis and acidogenic reactions and the other to handle acetogenic and methanogenesis. The resulting main products are methane and carbon dioxide in biogas and liquid forms. The biogas, which has a ratio of 60 methane to 40 carbon dioxide, can be used as a power source. Liquid materials can be used in other ways.
Such an operation can process up to 36 tons of food waste per day to produce 1.3 million cubic meters of methane per day.
Fossil fuel-generated electric power leads to increases in greenhouse emissions. Anaerobic digestion is an environmentally friendly process that produces methane, which can be used as fuel to help decrease greenhouse emissions.
In this design, food waste is purified in a separation process and combined with manure to enrich the organic matter. Then the anaerobic digestion process uses two reactors to maintain stability, one that handles the hydrolysis and acidogenic reactions and the other to handle acetogenic and methanogenesis. The resulting main products are methane and carbon dioxide in biogas and liquid forms. The biogas, which has a ratio of 60 methane to 40 carbon dioxide, can be used as a power source. Liquid materials can be used in other ways.
Such an operation can process up to 36 tons of food waste per day to produce 1.3 million cubic meters of methane per day.
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