title: Effects of various pretreatments for enhanced anaerobic digestion with waste activated sludge.
abstract: The purpose of this study was to enhance the efficiency of anaerobic digestion with waste activated sludge (WAS) by batch experiments. We studied the effects of various pretreatment methods (thermal, chemical, ultrasonic and thermochemical pretreatments) on the biogas production and pollutants reduction owing to solubilization enhancement, particle size reduction, increased soluble protein, and increased soluble COD. The thermochemical pretreatment gave the best results, i.e., the production of methane increased by more than 34.3% and soluble COD (SCOD) removal also increased by more than 67.8% over the control. In this case, the biogas production, methane production and the SCOD removal efficiency were about 5037 l biogas/m3 WAS, 3367 l methane/m3 WAS and 61.4%, respectively. Therefore, it is recognized that higher digestion efficiencies of the WAS were obtained through thermochemical pretreatment of the sludge.
authors.affiliation: Advanced Energy & Environment Research Team, Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, Chonan 330-825, Korea.
authors.forename: Jeongsik
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Chulhwan
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: Tak-Hyun
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Myunggu
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Sangyong
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Seung-Wook
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Jinwon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lee