What are the futures for research on the anaerobic digestion processes field?
Is the search for optimal conditions for the best methane production still a good focus for research?
What types of emerging wastes are gaining focus right now in this area?
@ Arthar, I think research should be aimed at more production of renewable energy and more biodegradable sludge to dispose.
You can simply find your answer by reading some recently reviewing paper in this case and find wat are routes that are not addressed to or you can enhance....
Following are the future of anaerobic digestion.
Economic, agronomic & environmental are the main future,Diversified Farm Revenue, Rural Economic Growth. Conservation of Agricultural Land., Energy Independence, Sustainable Food Production.& Farm-Community Relationships.
Arthur Ribeiro Torrecilhas many are doing the same researches which have been done and optimising the same at the economic options and yes developing and working on the microbial development and robust systems are what everyone is eyeing on right now
While research continues on the optimization of operating conditions and microbial growth, one of the major challenges is sludge management with energy efficiency and economic evaluation.
There have been enough studies on the optimal conditions for anaerobic digestion. For some special digestion systems, such as high OLR, high nitrogen content, easily hydrolyzed substrates, and mono-digestion systems, there is still a lot of work to be done. In addition, in the future, we need to pay more attention to the entire industrial chain of anaerobic digestion, such as how to treat biogas slurry and residue in an efficient and environmentally friendly manner.
This is a good question that puts us all on the spot. Apologies for taking the liberty to express my general views about it.
I think research has two functions: "Maintenance" of knowledge, and "Developing new ideas".
I think there is value on researching established technologies to ensure the skills and knowledge are kept up-to-date and technical expertise to support industrial applications is maintained. The AD process has been used for hundreds of years. In my opinion, it was this "Maintenance" research into optimising a then already established process what enabled what was considered an "unstable process" in the 70s and 80s to be fine-tuned and become relatively well understood and controlled. The belief that a little air would "kill" a digester, and other misconceptions have been addressed often through mistakes during research and operation. In addition, there is vast variation in basic operating conditions, feedstock characteristics, etc. that merit keeping research into these fundamental topics. So, I still get excited reading papers that look into "optimisation of biogas production" because I think there is still potential for new knowledge to come from it, for example for high fat, high ammonium and even single substrates. How can we best use agricultural by-products, such as cow and chicken litter, etc. The environmental impact or benefits of AD, etc. However, I do not get excited by papers that claim to have doubled methane yields and are often based on limited BMP tests ;)
On the future research fronts, my thought is that Methane is a well established output, but may not be the best long term output from AD. The technical aspects and benefits of digestate use in agriculture have received little attention. The use and multiple products from digestate including as agricultural fertilisers, for chemicals or biological agents, such as novel antibiotics, etc. How AD integrates into the biological factories of the future and how its different stages could, or not, be separated for target products. On that front, physic-chemical processes for separation of chemicals of interests could be other areas? I have not mentioned microbiological studies because this is an area of multiple work. We work on potential new biological control mechanisms using nano-technology and artificial intelligence for self-controlled AD and are just beginning to prepare equipment to start on this quest.
In the end, I go back to a question I often ask myself: What do we do all this for?
Without cheap sentimentality, I think most of us want to contribute in our own way to leave a better world. I accept that in 100 years, or even much sooner, someone may prove we could have done better, but it is this common effort that gradually will give rise to new ideas and a more sustainable future. Like with space exploration, the tools developed for one task may be used to solve other problems, this is the beauty of research.
I better stop now. Best wishes
Edgar
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