The study investigated methane production from dehydrated waste-activated sludge (DWAS) with approximately 80% water content under thermophilic conditions. The repeated batch-wise treatment of DWAS using methanogenic sludge unacclimated to high concentrations of ammonia, increased the ammonia production up to 7,600 mg N per kilogram total wet sludge of total ammonia concentration, and stopped the methane production. Investigation revealed that the loading ratio of DWAS for methanogenic sludge influences anaerobic digestion. Methane production significantly decreased and ammonia concentration increased with the increase in loading ratio of DWAS. Since the semicontinuous culture revealed that approximately 50% of organic nitrogen in DWAS converted to ammonia at sludge retention time (SRT) after 4 days at 37 degrees C and 1.33 days at 55 degrees C, the previous stripping of the ammonia produced from DWAS was carried out. The stripping of ammonia increased methane production significantly. This ammonia-methane two-stage anaerobic digestion demonstrated a successful methane production at SRT 20 days in the semicontinuous operation using a laboratory-scale reactor system.

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The conventional pressure change method used in leakage tests is sensitive to the ambient temperature variation. We propose a new method using a correlation technique to compensate for temperature variation in pressure change leakage detection. In the proposed method, gas within a vessel is compressed in such a sequence that it shows no correlation with the ambient temperature variation. The extent of leakage is estimated from the correlation between the pressure variation in the vessel and the compression sequence signal. Experimental results showed that leakage can be successfully detected by the proposed method without being affected by temperature variation.

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: The pressure change method of leak testing has the serious disadvantage of being susceptible to ambient temperature change. Two or more successive leak tests are typically performed to eliminate the error caused by such change. We propose a new leak detection scheme in which multiple successive leak tests are performed on the basis of the Lagrange interpolation formula. With this scheme, we can optimally perform multiple successive leak tests for a given temperature variation. After describing the theoretical aspects of the proposed scheme, we will show experimental results of leak detection using a prototype leak detector and model piping. Results indicate that a leak can be detected using the proposed scheme without being affected by the given temperature variation.