Effect of Thermal Pretreatment on the Kinetic Parameters of Anaerobic Digestion from Recycled Pulp and Paper Sludge

This paper investigates the influence of thermal pretreatment on kinetic parameters based on four kinetic models: Modified Gompertz, transference and logistic functions and first order equation. The kinetic modeling was applied on experimental results of previous study on producing methane from anaerobic digestion of Recycled Pulp and Paper Sludge (RPPS) under mesophilic conditions. We observed that the thermal pretreatment improve considerably improved the kinetic parameters mainly the methane production rate and the lag phase. Indeed, it can be noted that methane production rate μ increases significantly from a value of 4.72 to 16.27 ml/h using logistic function for 1 g VS/L added load. Then the lag phase parameter λ has dramatically decreased from 5.46 to 1.04 h using logistic function for 1.5 g VS/L added load. This means that the thermal pretreatment of RPPS accelerates the methane production process and saves time.