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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Andrew Zealand, Professor Tony Roskilly, Professor David GrahamORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND).
© 2017 The Authors. China produces over 200 tonnes of rice straw (RS) a year. This is an underutilized energy source that is often burned in the fields causing pollution and health problems for populations near and far. Anaerobic digestion (AD) can produce methane (CH4) rich biogas (45-55%) from waste RS as an alternative to burning whilst being affordable. Five 2L reactors were used to test the effect of feeding frequency (FF) and organic loading rates (OLR) on the anaerobic digestion of rice straw with input rates of between 5 feeds per week and one feed every 3 weeks. Two OLRs were used: 1gVS/L/d (OLR1) for 56 days and 2gVS/L/d (OLR2) for 83 days. At the lower OLR1, the best average biogas yield was 300 ml/L of reactor/d at 50% CH4 and at OLR2 the best reactor achieved a mean biogas yield of 447 ml/L/d at 52%CH4. The best performing FF at OLR1 was 1/21 day whilst at OLR2 the 5/7 day FF produced the highest volume and quality of biogas. Results confirm that biogas from rice straw anaerobic digestion could be used with combined heat and power (CHP) technology to potentially produce 0.5-0.8MWh of electricity per day per tonne of rice straw.
Author(s): Zealand AM, Roskilly AP, Graham DW
Editor(s): Jinyue Yan, Fengchun Sun, SK Chou, Umberto Desideri, Hailong Li, Pietro Campana and Rui Xiong
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: 8th International Conference on Applied Energy (ICAE2016)
Year of Conference: 2017
Pages: 62-67
Print publication date: 01/05/2017
Online publication date: 01/06/2017
Acceptance date: 02/04/2016
Date deposited: 18/07/2017
ISSN: 1876-6102
Publisher: Elsevier Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2017.03.280
DOI: 10.1016/j.egypro.2017.03.280
Series Title: Energy Procedia
