A sustainable and affordable production design of cleaner biogas from human excreta using eggshell
No Thumbnail Available
Date
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Description
Low-quality, infectious pathogens, toxic chemicals, heavy metals, genotoxic, or radioactive particles are
associated problems of biogas derived from human excreta. Most researchers had focussed solely on
production optimization but with realities of pathogenic bioaerosols that may be dangerous to the
users, there is a need to focus on the clean source-enhanced biogas production from human excreta.
This research is designed to seek clear optimizable parameters in the clean production of biogas and its
commercialization. A laboratory set-up was constructed to determine the biogas yield, bacteria mass,
time of highest yield, and temperature. The surface response method was used to examine the influence
of the microbial growth modifications from syntropic acetate oxidation (SAO) to a novel syntropic
calcium acetate oxidation (SCAO) bacteria-using eggshell. It was observed that the human biogas
production can be as high as 1020 g/ml on laboratory-scale within 30 days. More so, the biogas quality
was improved by crashing the nitrogen gas content by 66%. The SCAO bacteria was observed to
decompose the ammonia gas to form methane and NOx gases at a ratio of 3:1 within the first 20 days.
The novel SCAO bacteria are suggested as good candidates to control ammonia and greenhouse gas
emissions from human waste. It is recommended that there are still more to be done in culturing SCAO
bacteria with slow growth and longer life span to make this process appreciate to industrial scale.
Keywords
QC Physics