Bio-Methane Potential Tests To Measure The Biogas Production From The Digestion and Co-Digestion of Complex Organic Substrates

Abstract

Bio-methane potential (BMP) tests are widely used in studies concerning the anaerobic digestion of organicsolids. Although they are often criticized to be time consumer, with an average length longer than 30 days, such tests aredoubtless easy to be conducted, relatively inexpensive and repeatable. Moreover, BMP tests give significant informationabout the bio-methanation of specific substrates and provide experimental results essential to calibrate and validatemathematical models. These last two aspects have been handled in this work where the following elements have been de-scribed in detail: i) the methods used to conduct the BMP tests; ii) the cumulative bio-methane curves obtained from threeBMP tests, concerning respectively two pure organic substrates (swine manure-SM and greengrocery waste-GW) and anorganic substrate obtained by mixing buffalo manure (BM) and maize silage (MS); iii) the procedure used to calibrate amathematical model proposed by the authors to simulate the anaerobic digestion process; iv) the results of the calibrationprocess. This paper shows that BMP tests are extremely helpful to determine the amount of bio-methane obtainable fromdifferent organic solids and under different operational conditions as well as the biodegradability of the investigated sub-strate, the relative specific rate of bio-methanation and the synergic effect of multiple co-digested substrates. FurthermoreBMP tests represent an interesting tool for the technical and economical optimization of bio-methane producing plants