Biohydrogen Production in Anaerobic Reactors

Over the past years, biohydrogen has emerged as one of the most appealing clean energy sources in order to eliminate the concerns of depleting fossil fuel reserves. Recently, anaerobic digestion or dark fermentation-based biohydrogen has gained lot of attention. Numerous techniques have been employed to increase the microbial-based biohydrogen production using renewable and sustainable substrates. With the aim to provide major insight of anaerobic-based biohydrogen production, this chapter summarizes the scope of anaerobic fermentation as well as different types of potential anaerobic bioreactors that can be employed for biohydrogen production. In addition, the effect of several operating parameters such as temperature, pH, hydraulic retention time, substrate, and type of microorganisms especially in mixed-microbe consortia are also discussed. The limitation and challenges associated with biohydrogen production as well as emerging strategies to increase the microbial growth and biohydrogen production rate are discussed in detail.