Continuous hydrogen production with anaerobic palm oil mill effluent (POME) sludge immobilized by synthetic polymer

The increasing of the palm oil processing has resulted the increasing of the Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) that can't be treated for drinking water and can lead to an increase the total waste water in Malaysia. Hydrogen has been recognized as a promising energy in the future for being clean, efficient and recyclable. Therefore, it can be replaced with other non-renewable energy such as coal, gasoline, petroleum and metal cores for energy. The feasibility of hydrogen generation from palm oil mill effluent (POME), a high strength wastewater with high solid content, was evaluated in an upflow anaerobic sequencing batch reactor (UASBR). Most studies for the hydrogen production in the applied cell suspension systems often encountered problem with biomass washout at high dilution rates and required recycling of biomass from the effluent to maintain sufficient cell density for continuous hydrogen production. This study is needed to determine the effect of temperature of the immobilized Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) reactor to the quality of the POME and to characterize the POME properties in terms of the COD, TSS and VSS before and after the sample is being treated. Four different temperatures, there is 30 °C, 35 °C, 40 °C and 45 °C at constant hydraulic retention times (HRT) in twelve hour, were tested to evaluate hydrogen productivity and operational stability of immobilized UASBR. The results showed higher system efficiency was achieved for temperature at 3 50C, with maximum hydrogen production rate of 320 mL-H 2 /h/L and hydrogen yield of 0.32 mol-112/mol-sucrose. COD removal reached in the range 45% - 50%. Butyrate was found to be the dominant metabolite in all temperature. Low concentration of volatile fatty acid (VFA) confirmed the state of stability and efficiency of the operation was achieved in immobilized UASBE.