Development of high-performance thermophilic two-phase digestion process

Anaerobic digestion of anaerobic sewage sludge leads to the generation of methane gas and reduction of the sludge volume. Because conventional digestion requires a long time, the digestion facilities must be large. We studied decomposing volatile suspended solids (VSS) in sewage sludge, capacitating high acid generation rates and a high-speed methane evolution reactor to reduce retention time for anaerobic digestion. We also studied how to increase VSS reduction ratio by using bio-technology. The high-performance thermophilic two-phase digestion (HPTTD) process is proposed as a innovative digestion system which has high-rate reducing and high-ratio reduction of volatile suspended solids in sewage sludge. This thermophilic digestion process consists of sludge conditioning, acidification and methanation steps. In the sludge conditioning step, sewage sludge is conditioned with thermal treatment and dosed with a protolytic enzyme. In the next step, acidification, acid fermentation is carried out at 70°C; this temperature is higher than that of conventional fermentation (conventional thermophilic digestion process: 55°C). In the methanation step an anaerobic fixed-bed reactor is used. In the digestion experiments using excess sludge, we obtained a 30% higher VSS reduction ratio (78% at HPTTD process) than that of conventional mesophilic digestion.