Abstract:
This work focuses, firstly, on the study of the anaerobic digestion process of date pits (substrate) in the presence of sewage sludge (inoculum), at a mesophilic temperature (37℃).
The main objective is to study the effect of pre-treatment of this substrate on the production of biogas and bio-methane, for an inoculum/substrate ratio of 1/3. Two pre-treatment methods were adopted, mechanical pre-treatment (exposure to ultrasonic waves for 15 and 30 minutes), and secondly chemical pre-treatment, using different concentrations of calcium hydroxide (1.25M, 0.625 M and 0.25M), the second method was applied at two temperatures 24 ℃ and 80℃.
The results of our experiments showed that chemical pre-treatment gave better biogas and methane production. In fact, 122 ml and 33 ml of biogas and biome thane respectively were obtained with chemical pre-treatment, compared with 32 ml and 16 ml of biogas and biome thane respectively with mechanical pre-treatment.
Chemical pretreatment has a positive effect on anaerobic co-digestion compared with mechanical pretreatment (ultrasonic waves) and that obtained with ordinary digestion.
