Enhancing anaerobic digestion of lignocellulosic materials in excess sludge by bioaugmentation and pre-treatment

This study attempted to enhance anaerobic conversion of lignocellulosic materials in excess sludge by bioaugmentation and pretreatment. The results reveal that highly active lignocellulolytic microorganisms (Clostridium stercorarium and Bacteroides cellulosolvens) could be enriched from anaerobic sludge in ordinarily operated anaerobic digester (AD). Inoculating these microorganisms into AD could substantially enhance the degradation of cellulose and hemicellulose. However, this effect of bioaugmentation was shielded for raw excess sludge due to lignin incrustation in native biosolids. For this problem, pre-treatments including acid, alkali, thermal and ultrasonic methods were effectively used to deconstruct the lignin incrustation, in which thermal pretreatment was demonstrated to be the most effective one. Then, pretreatment associated with bioaugmentation was successfully used to enhance the energy conversion of lignocellulosic materials, which resulted in the degradation of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin to 68.8-78.2%, 77.4-89% and 15.4-33.7% respectively and thus increased the CH4 production by 210-246%, compared with ordinary AD. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.