Anaerobic Treatment of Swine Wastewater in Semicontinuous Clayey Support Reactors

M. M. Durán-Barrantes, A. Jiménez-Rodriguez, F. Romero-Guzmán and J. A. Fiestas-Ros de Ursinos

Abstract
Three micronized clayey supports in laboratory-scale tank reactors under mesophilic conditions were studied. From the results obtained in a previous work, the temperature of θ = 25 °C was chosen. The start up and performance of these bioreactors, operating on swine wastewater feed, were also studied. The anaerobic treatment in a semicontinuous regime was carried out. Four stirred tank reactors were used, one of them containing suspended biomass for reference, while the rest contained various suspended micronized clay supports. The supports chosen were zeolite, esmectite, and saponite. The higher removal efficiency (about ηCOD 70% to 3.6 d HRT) was obtained when HRT increased in saponite and esmectite support reactors. Esmectite support showed the best anaerobic activity of microorganisms (μmax equal to 0.576 d–1). The reactor with zeolite support and the reference (non-support reactor) showed the worst yield in methane. The methane production model proposed by Chen and Hashimoto to achieve an optimum purifying performance was carried out. It accurately predicted the performance of the process and may be used in the design of treatment units.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Keywords
anaerobic digestion, semicontinuous process, clayey support, swine wastewater