Co-digestion in Anaerobic Digesters
Many communities are faced with decreasing landfill capacity and excess digestion capacity. The nexus of these two issues has led to the idea of digesting organic wastes at a municipal wastewater treatment facility. Dubbed "co-digestion," this approach to waste management can benefit all interested parties.
The ability to digest wastes trucked to a municipal facility relies on active monitoring of the digestion process. SENTRY™ provides a robust technology to monitor the accumulation of volatile (fatty) acids in the digester. This data can be used to create digester feeding regimes that maximize biogas production and volatile solids destruction, while avoiding costly "upsets" to the digestion process.
The key performance indicators for anaerobic digesters are the amount and quality of biogas produced; both quantity and quality are important. SENTRY™ provides the operator with a leading indicator of digestion performance. A rising SENTRY™ signal is an indication that volatile acids are accumulating and the methanogenic population is not effectively converting the volatile acids to methane.
SENTRY™ can reduce the frequency of analysis by using our signal as a proxy for VFA concentrations in the digesters. In turn, this information can be used to regulate food wastes added to the digesters for the purposes of maximizing tipping fees and biogas generation and sale/use.
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