Biogas Purification Using Calcium Alginate Beads Embedded with Microbial Biomass
摘要
Biogas is a highly efficient and beneficial energy source. Biogas is an energy source generated from the anaerobic decomposition of organic materials by bacteria. The anaerobic digestion (AD) process generates biogas, which pre-sents significant economic and environmental benefits. The raw biogas pro-duced from AD is lacking in quality as it contains methane (CH4), carbon di-oxide (CO2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and other impurities. This poses chal-lenges for its efficient utilization and requires a purification step to remove impurities. This research aims in enhancing the biogas produced by using microbial biomass embedded in calcium alginate beads. The microbial bio-mass will be taken from the AD byproduct which is the digestate. The calcium alginate beads will be prepared with a few types of ratios between sodium alginate and digestate. These beads are then used to purify the biogas by letting the gas flow through the beads. The effectiveness of the method de-pends on the changes in the concentrations of CH4, CO2, and H2S in the treated gas. By eliminating the CO2 and H2S the percentage of CH4 will increase, so does the quality of the biogas produced.