Highly Efficient Modular Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactor (AnMBR) for Biofuel Production from Wet Organic Waste Streams
- TDA Research, Inc.
A significant amount of wet organic waste, such as municipal sludges and biosolids, industrial, commercial, and residential food wastes, manure slurries, fats, oils, and greases is already collected, but presents a difficult disposal problem for municipalities and other responsible parties. The energy content of these wastes is vast and converting these wastes to high value liquid fuels has real economic potential. In Phase I TDA Research improved the existing anaerobic biofuel production process by developing a novel single stage in-line extraction system for Medium Chain Carboxylic Acids (MCCAs). We also demonstrated MCCA production from food and brewery waste streams in an anaerobic membrane bio reactor (AnMBR) that uses an in situ dynamic membrane. This system produced a particulate (total suspended solids TSS < 0.1 g/L) free fermentation liquor for TDA’s extraction unit so that it could extract the MCCA’s with high yield. Finally, we also completed a modular design for a AnMBR based process to produce biofuels from food and brewery waste streams (wet organic waste streams) at 0.2 ton/day scale, which can be scaled up to 1.2 ton per day of food waste processed by just putting 6 of our modular units together (membrane units, whose costs scale linearly with size are ideal for use in such small systems). We carried out a preliminary techno-economic analysis and life cycle analysis for the overall process to go from wet organic waste streams to long chain hydrocarbons via the MCCAs, followed by the Kolbe electrolysis process. In Phase II effort we propose to demonstrate the full process in a sub-scale prototype unit.
- Research Organization:
- TDA Research, Inc.
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0018745
- OSTI ID:
- 1507058
- Type / Phase:
- SBIR (Phase I)
- Report Number(s):
- Ph. I Final; TDA-R-2101-020-F
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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