High Performance Anaerobic Digestion

At the heart of biosolids processing improvements is high performance anaerobic digestion (HPAD). Digestion performance improvements result in more treatment capacity per unit volume to convert wastewater residuals to nutrient-rich, low-odor biosolids, more efficient conversion of organics to methane-rich biogas, and to improve overall biosolids quality. Although there are many conventional high rate mesophilic digestion systems that perform at a high level, there are system modifications to increase performance, which include raising to a thermophilic temperature, decoupling the hydraulic retention time (HRT) and solids retention time (SRT), increasing the solids concentration and pre-treatment processes enhancing hydrolysis, and cyclic metabolic environments.