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In the food industry, the brewing sector holds a strategic economic position: in the year 2013, the beer production of the EU-28 was equal to 383,553,000 hL. The brewing process includes chemical and biochemical reactions and solid-liquid separations, involving the generation of various residues and by-products, among which the major two fractions are brewer's spent grain (BSG), and exhausted brewery yeast (BY). Although until today their main use has been for animal feed, in recent years, several studies have investigated the application of anaerobic digestion in order to revalue the brewery wastes.In this work, specific methane production (SMP) and first-order solubilisation (disintegration + hydrolysis) rates (k sol ) for BSG and BY were evaluated. Biomethanation tests were performed in 5-L fed-batch stirred reactors at several substrate/inoculum ratios.

The management of wastewater treatment plants to comply with new strict effluent criteria is a great concern: the activated sludge modeling, when supported by an accurate calibration process, could be an essential tool for this purpose. In the present paper, three WWTPs were characterized in order to support their up-grade. Influent characteristics and activated sludge performances were studied by application of respirometry. Plant operations were simulated by BioWin software (EnviroSim Associates Ltd., Canada). The goodness of the simulation, checked by the calculation of the average relative deviation between measured and simulated data, demonstrated that the model was able to predict the plant performances

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