Biogas yield is one of the main priorities in any Anaerobic digestion process. The more gas your digester can produce, the more gas you can use to generate electricity, or feed back into the grid. In short, more gas produced = more money made.
Sisal fibre was used in an experiment to explore the link between substrate degradation and biogas yield in a process. This was to see how the industry can get the most from their AD system.
The report shows that the sisal fibre degraded in the digester went from 31% to 70% in the experiment. Biogas yield from this particular experiment increased 23% m3 CH4/kg.
How was this done? Maceration.
It has been proven that maceration of the feedstock can lead to quicker degradation of the substrate, in turn, producing a higher gas yield from the process. In this experiment, the original substrate used was raw and untreated. The substrate was then macerated to 2mm to see the difference in process outputs.
Of course, macerating feedstock to 2mm in an AD system may not always be practical. However, this experiment proves the importance of macerating feedstock to get the most out of your process.
