Microalgae Treatment Of Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) For Biohydrogen And Biomethane Production

• Main Author: Mohd Khairul Affendy Bin Kamarudin, Mohd Khairul Affendy
• Format: Final Year Project
• Published: Universiti Teknologi Petronas 2011
• Subjects: TP Chemical technology
• Online Access: http://utpedia.utp.edu.my/445/
• Institution: Universiti Teknologi Petronas

This report highlights the complete experiment studies on the Final Year Project 1 and 2 entitled “Microalgae Treatment of Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) for Biohydrogen and Biomethane Production”. This project investigates the study on microalgae growth on Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) as an alternate source of media culturing while acting as simultaneous functions for wastewater treatment and bioenergies production. The requirement of tertiary treatment to alleviate water pollution problems in Malaysia caused by waste discharged from industrial waste such as POME has lead to the analysis on the potential of microalgae as an alternative way in solving for high operation costs and efficiency problems in removing pollutants. Anaerobic digestions of POME is conducted and studied to determine the suitable conditions for algae growth as well as to examine their ability in assisting biohydrogen and biomethane production under anaerobic conditions. This final report highlighted the methodology for measuring composition of biogas production by using different stages of design method for anaerobic digestions of POME with the additional of inoculums, co-substrate, Empty Fruit Bunch (EFB) and algae (Tetraselmis sp.and Pavlouva sp.). Results shown that little percentage of hydrogen are obtained in samples with no inoculums added and improved on samples with additional of inoculums. No methane yield had shown on both samples with EFB addition with only presents without additional of EFB. Methane yield was found at the highest of anaerobic digestion of POME with introduction of Tetraselmis sp. and inoculums without additional of EFB source. In contrast, only methane production was shown improved for anaerobic digestion of POME with Pavlouva sp. whilst no hydrogen production shown from this stage.