Using Sawdust to Treat Synthetic Municipal Wastewater and Its Consequent Transformation Into Biogas

• Main Author: Zaidun Naji Abudi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Polish Society of Ecological Engineering (PTIE) 2018-09-01
• Series: Journal of Ecological Engineering
• Subjects: adsorption; sawdust; anaerobic digestion; total organic carbon
• Online Access: http://www.journalssystem.com/jeeng/Using-sawdust-to-treat-synthetic-municipal-wastewater-and-its-consequent-transformation,91271,0,2.html

Sawdust, as an agricultural waste which is highly efficient, readily available, and relatively inexpensive, has the potential to be an applicable alternative adsorbent for the total organic carbon (TOC) removal from synthetic domestic wastewater. This study aims firstly to investigate the feasibility of sawdust as a new adsorbent and understand its adsorption mechanism for TOC. The impact of particle size, pH, contact time, and temperature has been evaluated as the controlling factors on the adsorption process. The results presented that the removal efficiency rose with the decrease of particle size, pH, and temperature, as well as the increase of the contact time. The maximum adsorption was obtained at particle size of 0.05mm, pH of 1, contact time of 1.5h, and temperature of 15oC, respectively. The second aim of this study is to utilize the sawdust that is used in the adsorption process as biomass in batch anaerobic digestion (AD) to produce methane. Spent sawdust was characterized by the methane production which was 5.9 times greater than in the case of raw sawdust. Four operating parameters were checked, Carbon/Nitrogen ratio (C/N), inoculation, particle size, and total solid (TS) content. The batch results indicated that the optimum parameters were: 20%, 30%, 2 mm, and 15%, respectively.