Biogas Production from Anaerobic Digestion of Food Waste

Waste management problem has raised a huge attention from many authorities. Besides that, non-renewable energy depletion caused awareness to the society on curbing the issue. Due to these current issues, biogas production from solid waste was introduced. In this work the method to produce the biogas was anaerobic digestion. It is a digestion process of organic wastes without the presence of oxygen. A lab scale anaerobic digester for batch mode was built. Methane production from solid waste specifically food waste (green waste, kitchen waste etc.) was done. The digestion process was done by the aid of inoculum which was cow dung as the amount of micro-organisms is high. A 350 liters plastic container of height 90 cm and diameter 70 cm was used as a bio-digester and biogas was collected in tyre tubes. Methane tank was filled up to 70% of volume by organic wastes. Methane production was monitored daily and in detail on weekly basis. It was found that using a mixture of cow dung and food waste retention period was 21 days. Gas started to produce on 7th day. Amount of biogas obtained was 136 dm3. This biogas digester may be used domestically as well as for the demonstrative purposes.