Mesophilic and Thermophilic Anaerobic Digestion of Model Kitchen Waste with Variation of Fat Content

Synthetic kitchen waste, produced on basis of a real kitchen waste, and two of its variations are studied. Previous study showed that the fermentation of kitchen waste was similar to the degradation of synthetic kitchen waste, further called model kitchen waste (MKW) with the same amounts of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. In this study the anaerobic degradation of this MKW (named MKW1; 23 % rapeseed oil) was investigated under mesophilic and thermophilic conditions at 2 different loadings. Additional experiments were performed with lower (MKW2; 14.7 %) and higher (MKW3; 27.2 %) rapeseed oil content at the expense of starch. An organic loading of 5 gVS/l leads to a fast and undisturbed degradation under mesophilic conditions. The volatile fatty acids (mainly acetic acid) appeared only during the first 3 days. Finally the amount of biogas been produced is weakly correlated with the oil content. Under thermophilic conditions the biogas production was retarded and the concentrations of the volatile fatty acids were generally higher whereas acetic acid was present for a period of 10 days. The final biogas amount was higher than compared to mesophilc conditions. At a higher loading of 25 gVS/l a strong retardation of biogas production was observed which correlates with very high concentrations of volatile fatty acids over the whole runtime period of 50 days.