Bioprocessing of Recalcitrant Substrates for Biogas Production

Sammanfattning: The application of anaerobic digestion (AD) as a sustainable waste management technology is growing worldwide, due to high energy prices as well as increasingly strict environmental regulations. The growth of the AD industry necessitates exploring new substrates for their utilisation in AD processes. The present work investigates the AD of two recalcitrant biomass: lignocelluloses and keratin-rich residues. The complex nature of these waste streams limits their biological degradation; therefore, suitable pre-processing is required prior to the AD process.In the first part of the study, the effects of organic solvent pre-treatments on bioconversion of lignocelluloses (straw and forest residues) to biogas were evaluated. Pre-treatment with N-methylmorpholine-N-oxide (NMMO) resulted in minor changes in the composition of the substrates, while their digestibility significantly increased. Furthermore, due to the high cost of the NNMO, the effect of pre-treatment with the recycled solvent was also explored. Since it was found that the presence of small traces of NMMO in the system after the treatment has inhibitory effects on AD, pre-treatments of forest residues using other organic solvents, i.e. acetic acid, ethanol, and methanol, were investigated too. Although pre-treatments with acetic acid and ethanol led to the highest methane yields, the techno-economical evaluation of the process showed that pre-treatment with methanol was the most viable economically, primarily due to the lower cost of methanol, compared to that of the other solvents.In the second part of the work, wool textile wastes were subjected to biogas production. Wool is mainly composed of keratin, an extremely strong and resistible structural protein. Thermal, enzymatic and combined treatments were, therefore, performed to enhance the methane yield. The soluble protein content of the pre-treated samples showed that combined thermal and enzymatic treatments had significantly positive effects on wool degradation, resulting in the highest methane yields, i.e. 10–20-fold higher methane production, compared to that obtained from the untreated samples.In the last part of this thesis work, dry digestion of wheat straw and wool textile waste, as well as their co-digestion were studied. The total solid (TS) contents applied in the digesters were between 6–30% during the investigations. The volumetric methane productivity was significantly enhanced when the TS was increased from 6 to 13–21%. This can be a beneficial factor when considering the economic feasibility of large-scale dry AD processes.