Biogas production from algae

• Main Author: Ng, Lai Keng.
• Other Authors: Wang Jing-Yuan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Environmental engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/15852
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With rising oil and food prices, biogas production from algae has become an increasingly important topic to produce energy at a low cost. The preliminary study of using algae in this paper will provide a guide for future research purposes. The main objective of this study was to optimize the hydrolysis process with variable parameters like seed sludge and pretreatments. The controlled parameters were feed concentration and temperature, and the measuring parameters included pH, chemical oxygen demand (COD), volatile fatty acid (VFA), gas composition, gas volume, total suspended solids (TSS) and voltile suspended solids (VSS). It was observed that using acclimated UFBR as seed sludge in the 10 ml vial batch run had obtained a high VFA value of 62 mM and its equivalent COD value of approximate 7.28 g. The unanticipated result was approximately two to three times higher than the other pretreatment processes. The VSS results from semi-continuous reactor showed that the highest VSS reduction % was only 28 % and the C/N ratio calculated was about 5.4. This suggested that the algae have to be codigested with other high carbon substrate to maintain a favorable environment in the reactor. It was also observed that a HRT of 26 days was found to be the optimum days.