Zeitschrift für Bioremediation und biologischen Abbau

Abstrakt

Production of Fertilizer from Process Water Generated by Hydrothermal Carbonization of Food Waste

De Silva KBNS, Senarath-Yapa M and Gunatilake SK

Hydrothermal Carbonization (HTC) is a promising thermochemical technique that could be practiced as a method of energy and material recovery. As food waste is a wet, inhomogeneous biomass, it shows desirable potential to undergo HTC, other than other thermal conversion technologies. According to the physiochemical characterization of process water, it contains nutrients such as, Magnesium (Mg2+), Ammonium (NH4+) and Phosphate (PO43-). Therefore, struvite precipitation was tested as the potential solution. Struvite yield was calculated in order to find out the efficiency and the feasibility of the precipitation method. Since struvite can be used as a fertilizer, building material or adsorbent, this will be a commercially viable application to produce value added product from HTC process water. According to analysed results, process water should have either a proper treatment mechanism or a properly designed water purification plant.