title: On-field study of anaerobic digestion full-scale plants (Part II): new approaches in monitoring and evaluating process efficiency.
abstract: Biogas plants need easy and practical tools for monitoring and evaluating their biological process efficiency. As soon as, in many cases, biomass supply present considerable costs, full-scale anaerobic digestion (AD) processes must approach, as much as possible, the potential biogas yield of the organic mixture fed to the biodigesters. In this paper, a new indicator is proposed (the bio-methane yield, BMY), for measuring the efficiency in full-scale AD processes, based on a balance between the biochemical methane potential (BMP) of the input biomass and the residual BMP of the output materials (digestate). For this purpose, a one-year survey was performed on three different full-scale biogas plants, in the Italian agro-industrial context, and the bio-chemical processes were fully described in order to calculate their efficiencies (BMY = 87-93%) and to validate the new indicator proposed, as useful and easily applicable tool for full-scale AD plants operators.
authors.affiliation: Ricicla Group-Di.Pro.Ve.-Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Celoria 2, 20133 Milano, Italy. andrea.schievano@unimi.it
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Schievano
authors.forename: Giuliana
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: D'Imporzano
authors.forename: Valentina
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Orzi
authors.forename: Fabrizio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Adani
mesh_terms: D000693:Anaerobiosis; D000821:Animal Feed / Q000032:analysis*; D001673:Biodegradation, Environmental; D019149:Bioreactors; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D007558:Italy; D008697:Methane / Q000096:biosynthesis*
chemical_list: D008697:Methane