Transient response and stability of anaerobic reactors following interm tttant feeding

Abstract

Anaerobic treatment offers a number of attractive advantages in the treatment of highstrength organic waste water, but difficulties in maintaining process stability is a disadvantage. The process is sensitive to changes in environmental and operating conditions and disturbance in microbial balance often results in failure of the process. Industrial anaerobic reactor operations seldom can be characterized by true steady state operations. Stability is paramount in the operation of large scale anaerobic co-digestion plants which are operated intermittently under varying feed flow patterns and feed compositions. If instability occurs, variations of biogas compositions will lead to make operating problems in subsequent operations such as electricity generations. Most of anaerobic co-digestion processes are run below maximum capacity due to the danger of failure of overloading. Thus it is needed to conduct lab scale experiments to screen different options before designing and commissioning large scale processes.