POTENTIALITY OF BIOGAS PRODUCTION USING ANAEROBIC DIGESTER WITH STRUCTURAL DEVELOPMENT AT LOWER AND UPPER EGYPT IN WINTER

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Assoc. Prof., Agric. Eng. Dept., Fac. of Agric., Zagazig Univ., Egypt.

2 Lecturer, Agric. Eng. Dept., Fac. of Agric., Zagazig Univ., Egypt.

Abstract

This work presents structure development for a family-scale floating dome anaerobic digester for producing biogas represents in using pre-constructed concrete digestion chamber instead of the conventional digester in attempt to reduce the time and costs of construction. Also, the digestion performance of the developed digester was evaluated during winter season to investigate the potentiality of producing rich-biogas yield at Lower of Egypt (LoE) as a cold region and Upper of Egypt (UoE) as more temperate region by building up two identical digesters using dairy cattle dung. Furthermore, feasibility of the produced biogas was performed to determine the cost of the biogas energy unit comparing to the cost of energy unit of other energy sources. The obtained data revealed that, using of the developed digester at UoE led to increase the average daily, cumulative and specific biogas yield with about 40.20, 45.78 and 44.08%, respectively higher than the digester at LoE, in addition to a remarkable increment in daily and total gained biogas energy by about 46.64 and 51.40%, respectively with high average methane yield of 70.52%. From economic point of view, the developed digester reduced the time and total cost of construction with about 86.67% and 41.32%, respectively comparing to the conventional digester with the same volume and design. Additionally, the cost per biogas energy unit for the developed digester at LoE and UoE were 0.014 and 0.007 EGP/MJ, respectively which are lower than the actual costs (not subsidized) per energy unit of natural gas (the lowest price of energy unit in Egypt) by about 85.41% and 92.7 %, respectively according to 2018 prices. Ultimately, the developed digester has a good prospective economically and on the level of digestion performance, especially in temperate regions.

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