Anaerobic digestion of high‐strength cheese whey utilizing semicontinuous digesters and chemical flocculant addition

Abstract

Semicontinuous digesters were used to anaerobically treat high-strength whey (70 kg/m(3).COD). A maximum loading of 16.1 kg COD/m(3).day was obtained with soluble COD removal efficiencies greater than 99%. The use of a chemical flocculant resulted in an increased biomass concentration in the digester compared to a control, thus enabling correspondingly higher space loadings to be applied. With the onset of substantial levels of granulation of the biomass, flocculant dosage was able to be discontinued. This article discusses the performance of the digesters in detail and, briefly, the long-term operational difficulties experienced and the control strategies employed on such systems.

Cheese whey management: A review

“…Other advanced reactor configurations like the hybrid reactor (Malaspina et al, 1996) and reactors with flocculant addition (Barford et al, 1986) have also been tested achieving high organic removals from raw CW (98% and 99%, respectively). The hybrid reactor has the advantage of accomplishing the separation phase in the same reactor, reducing, therefore, the operation costs.…”

Anaerobic treatment of dairy wastewaters: a review

“…Anaerobic treatment applications for dairy industry wastewaters have been evaluated in a number of previous studies [48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]. More recent information about anaerobic treatment practices of dairy waste streams are also displayed in Table 3.…”

The treatment of cheese whey wastewater by sequential anaerobic and aerobic steps in a single digester at pilot scale

“…Studies on the treatment of cheese whey wastewaters have been initially performed with single phase anaerobic digestion systems (Barford et al, 1986;Yan et al, 1989). The anaerobic digestion of whey wastewaters can be problematic for the state-of-health of the biomass in the digester.…”