Alkaline pretreatment for enhancement of biogas production from banana stem and swine manure by anaerobic codigestion

The objective of this research was to propose and investigate the availability of digested banana stem (BS) to produce biogas. Squeezed BS with less moisture content was used for biogas production through a combination of NaOH pretreatment, solid-state fermentation, and codigestion technologies. NaOH doses were optimized according to biogas fermentation performance, and the best dose was 6% (by weight) based on the total solid (TS) of BS. Under this condition, the lignin, cellulose, and hemicellulose contents decreased from 18.36%, 32.36% and 14.6% to 17.10%, 30.07%, and 10.65%, respectively, after pretreatment. After biogas digestion, TS and volatile solid (VS) reductions of the codigestion were 48.5% and 70.4%, respectively, and the biogas and methane yields based on VS loading were 357.9 and 232.4 mL/g, which were 12.1% and 21.4%, respectively, higher than the control. Results indicated that the proposed process could be an effective method for using BS to produce biogas. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.