Is anyone having practical experience in using kitchen wastewater as water source (instead of normal water for dilution) in biogas production? What are its merit and demerits. Detergents in kitchen wastewater is a demerit I guess. How can I use it to my advantage?
Detergents in water lead to its enrichment in phosphates. After a pretreatment, you could use the water in the begining for algal cultures...
But without pretreatment, can i use for biogas production? Wastewater treatment plant producing biogas will also have detergent in it.
Dr. Vohar,
Certainly the wastewater can be used to produce "BIOGAS" with a biological process due to its high C and H concentration. However, it can be used to produce "BIOGAS" through gasification. Coal gasification needs water addition. We can add your kitchen wastewater to produce gases which are part of the so called "BIOGAS".
Good luck
Maohong Fan
You check the VSS/TSS ratio in wastewater. If this ratio is greater than 0.8, then it is eligible for biogas production.
Dear Mushtafa
Yes definitely one can use kitchen waste water for biogas production.
It will help in biogas production as it contains organic maters which can useful for biogas production. The detergent will not be matters much. We are using all kichen waste including water to biogas plant.
Shripad Joshi
You should also consider the concentration of lipids, oil and grease
Thank you all. I have started my batch and experiments using kitchen wastewer as diluent and it seems working.
Dear Vohra,
Kitchen waste to dilute the substrate will be good option. The influence of detergents present in the kitchen waste depends on the dilution ration you are making. If your primary substrate is more organic with high COD, there will be no negative influence. more over the there is possibility to get the micro nutrients from the kitchen waste/sewage. I can foreseen that the high phosphates concentration leads to precipitation of carbonates and it can also leads to the high sludge formation. Some extent it is also positive factor for the process.
instead of using specifically kitchen waste, it is better to use sewage as dilution water. you can refer the following paper for more details.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036031990901739X
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0043135497000596
Kitchen wastewater can be a good substrate for biogas production because of the diverse mix of organics, fats, protien and carbonhydrates. However, the presence of detergents used for washing may hamper or inhibit sensitive bacteria, thus its usage may be stromgly dependent on wash detergents used in washing processes.
I converted my septic tank into a biogas reactor and channeled all wastewater from my building including kitchen wastewater into the reactor. It was able to supply all the cooking gas needs of my household 0f six person. However, the use of detergent in cleaning up the toilet and the kitchen results in rapid decrease in biogas production. I had to discontinue until i can solve the detergent toxicity problem of the reactor.
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