Designing a viable biogas production system : a technical solution for rural community development.
Biodigesters are one of the renewable energy technologies that can contribute to rural community development by ushering in energy supply from sustainable, affordable, and accessible alternative energy sources. However, biogas production technology has not been vastly adopted and efficiently utilized due to lack of technical control measures, maintenance, and a project-based approach. A research project was conducted to evaluate and analyze the processes which enable efficient anaerobic biodegradation using cow dung and pig waste. Moreover, to determine the biodigester design that can be adopted in rural communities with reference to Zimbambwe to meet the daily biogas demand of a typical rural household. An analysis was also done to determine the maximum amount of water to be considered in the proposed system for an efficient biogas production. This study has drawn a conclusion that pig waste has the capacity to produce 374.07 ml of methane per gram of volatile solids at a normalized standard (Nml) meaning at 0 °C and 1 atm, and cow dung can produce 102.49 Nml per gram of volatile solids in 40 days, thus making them recommendable sources of biogas, paying attention to operational parameters. It was observed that the ideal hydraulic retention time for biogas production for this experiment with pig waste and cow dung is 22 days at 37 °C since it produced 98 % of the total methane volume produced during the 40 days period. The obtained results depicts that the biogas volume produced by 4 pigs, or 4 cows can meet the demand of the biogas volume of the targeted beneficiaries and the recommended volume of the digester for 4 pigs should be 3.76 m3, for cows it should be 11.4 m3.The biodigester design that can be adapted is the tubular PVC geomembrane because of the relative low-cost price, easy to construct, transport and maintain with an emphasis on adding a screening facility, a solar pump to control internal pressure and a desulfurization method. According to the analysis done, the study also concluded that the maximum amount of water necessary for the proposed system is 12 liters per pig per day and 34 liters per cow per day.
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| Format: | info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis biblioteca |
| Language: | eng |
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Universidad EARTH
2021-12
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| Subjects: | BIOGAS, METANO, ESTIERCOL DE PORCINO, ZIMBAWE, https://purl.org/pe-repo/ocde/ford#4.01.01, |
| Online Access: | https://repositorio.earth.ac.cr/handle/UEARTH/200 |
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