Combining pH and electrical conductivity measurements to improve titrimetric methods to determine ammonia nitrogen, volatile fatty acids and inorganic carbon concentrations

Volatile fatty acids (VFA), inorganic carbon (IC) and total ammonia nitrogen (TAN) are key variables in the current context of anaerobic digestion (AD). Accurate measurements like gas chromatography and infrared spectrometry have been developed to follow the concentration of these compounds but none of these methods are affordable for small AD units. Only titration methods answer the need for small plant monitoring. The existing methods accuracy was assessed in this study and reveals a lack of accuracy and robustness to control AD plants. To solve these issues, a new titrimetric device to estimate the VFA, IC and TAN concentrations with an improved accuracy was developed. This device named SNAC (System of titration for total ammonia Nitrogen, volatile fatty Acids and inorganic Carbon) has been developed combining the measurement of electrical conductivity and pH. SNAC were tested on 24 different plant samples in a range of 0-0.16 mol.L-1 TAN, 0.01-0.21 mol.L-1 IC and 0-0.04 mol.L-1 VFA. The standard error was about 0.012 mol.L-1 TAN, 0.015 mol.L-1 IC and 0.003 mol.L-1 VFA. The coefficient of determination R2 between the estimated and reference data was 0.95, 0.94 and 0.95 for TAN, IC and VFA respectively. Using the same data, current methods based on key pH points lead to standard error more than 14.5 times higher on VFA and more than 1.2 times higher on IC. These results show that SNAC is an accurate tool to improve the management of AD plant. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.