Kinetic Study of Biogas Production from Chicken Manure

Master's Thesis from the year 2023 in the subject Engineering - Chemical Engineering, grade: 5.0 (A), , language: English, abstract: The use of biogas as fuel for transportation, electricity generation, heating and in cooking stoves, justify its production as alternative fuel to natural gas. Waste, posing serious danger to the environment, especially chicken manures (CM) containing disease-causing microorganisms, if utilized via anaerobic digestion to generate biogas will go a long way in mitigating its effect. This work, hence, desires to turn the detrimental health challenges that these microbes could cause humans and animals to generate useful by-products.

Therefore, this work aims at studying the kinetics of biogas production using CM. The objectives entail utilizing a bench-scale digester to produce biogas; studying the growth kinetics of microorganisms acting on the feedstock; profile the gas generated and using POLYMATH regression tool to study comparatively, the modified Gompertz, Cone, Transfert and Logarithmic biogas yield kinetic models. The method followed involves feeding the digester with 7 kg of CM after proximate analysis, determining the biomass concentration and daily gas production over a 40 days retention period using the biogas and cell growth data in models to describe the conditions inside the digesting system and the biogas potential of the CM substrate and lastly, analyzing the raw gas produced to know its constituent gases.