Experiments and Simulation of a Solar-Assisted Household Biogas System

Almost all of finished household biogas plants in China incorporated medium-temperature fermentation and no auxiliary heating were integrated. Accordingly the production efficiency was quite poor due to lack of reasonable thermal support. Meanwhile solar-collector became more and more popular accompanied with decreasing cost resulting from mass production. A solar-assisted biogas system was put forward and experimentally investigated in this paper. The initiative was to combine popularly-available house biogas plant with solar-collector at a reasonable cost, therefore to maintain year-round operation of biogas plant and to produce enough amount of biogas in winter for daily use. The recorded data in a pilot project revealed that additional electricity consumed accounted to only 7.2% of biogas produced, suggesting an economically feasible approach. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.