Research and Development of a Novel Demo-scale Two-Stage Anaerobic Digestion Process for Renewable Energy Production and Treatment of High Strength Organic Industrial Streams

This project focuses on the research and development of a novel two-stage anaerobic digestion (AD) process to create an array of renewable products such as transportation fuels, chemicals, and plastics from sustainable biomass sources i.e. lignocellulosic crops, and to use wastes such as agricultural residues or municipal green bin collections or animal manures. The novel process will expand the application of the AD process beyond its current primary use for solids and organic wastes treatment to a first-of-a-kind venue. The application of this two-stage anaerobic digestion process is to focus on the productivity aspects of the process with respect to hydrogen and methane. The ultimate goal is to develop an anaerobic digestion process capable of converting feedstocks from various sources using the concept of co-digestion to renewable hydrogen and methane gases and to integrate the process with another novel Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process to convert the renewable gases into liquid fuels.

Faculty Supervisor:

Abdul-Fattah Asfour

Student:

Hanan El-Sayed

Partner:

GreenField Ethanol Inc

Discipline:

Engineering - civil

Sector:

Life sciences

University:

University of Windsor