The effects of pH, temperature and agitation on biogas production under mesophilic regime

Currently, Morocco gives a high priority to the development of renewable energies, including biogas, resulting from anaerobic digestion, it presents a promising sector for the energy future of the country. With all of its donations energy and environmental, this process remains little exploited to date, which is due in large part to the non-mastery of this technology. The objective of this work is the optimization of the operating conditions of the process, and more specifically the study of the influence of pH, temperature and the agitation on biogas production. With this intention, it was carried out a series of experiments which relates to the variation in the temperature and the mode of agitation. For the of agitation mode, we opted for two types, continuous and without agitation, as for the temperature we chose values between 37, 39 and 40°C. For all experiments, the fermentation has been carried with a retention time fixed at 21 days, by applying a physical pretreatment to the substrate, for reduce the particle size to 10mm. The results showed a high correlation between temperature and the production of biogas, with an improvement in the amount of biogas produced, recorded for temperature of digestion of 40 °C with agitation.