The effect of different feeding rates of substrate pretreated in a vortex layer apparatus on dark fermentative biohydrogen production

   The dark fermentation (DF) process is of considerable interest for the production of biohydrogen from organic waste. However, industrial implementation of DF is still limited due to the insufficiently high efficiency of this process. In this work, the effect of different substrate feeding rates (1; 1,5 and 3 d-1, which corresponded to the time between loadings of 24, 16 and 8 h) in the DF bioreactor on the main characteristics of the process was investigated at a constant value of the hydraulic retention time (HRT) and organic loading rate (OLR) equal to 1 day and 24 g VS/(L day), respectively. To increase the overall hydrogen production rate and hydrogen yield, the substrate was pre-treated in a vortex layer apparatus (VLA). Hydrogen yield (HY), hydrogen production rate (HPR), hydrogen content (H2) in biogas and dissolved iron content in the substrate were the highest at a substrate feeding rate of 3 d-1 (8 h between substrate feeds) and amounted to 618 ± 225 ml/g VS, 14,84 ± 5,4 l/(l day), 54,8 ± 4,4 %, and 51,5 ± 38,9 mg/L, respectively. The main hydrogen producer in the microbial community (more than 80 %) was the genus Thermoanaerobacterium. Thus, it was demonstrated that the use of the highest feeding rate of the substrate (which corresponds to the shortest time between loadings) pretreated in the VLA provides the greatest stability and efficiency of the DF process. The obtained results are of significant importance for further improvement of the DF technology and can be applied when scaling the process in the future.

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