Project
Title
Fehlvergärungen und Prozessstörungen in landwirtschaftlichen Biogasanlagen - Etablierung und Umsetzung eines Labor- und Verfahrensprotokolls zur zeitnahen Ursachenaufklärung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Systemmikrobiologie
Acronym
BIOGAS-LIVE
Start
01.11.2014
End
31.12.2017
Coordinating Institute
Leibniz-Institut für Agrartechnik und Bioökonomie e.V. (ATB)
Coordinator
Summary
Process faults in biogas plants may cause in individual cases ecomomic losses of more than 100,000 Euros. In addition to physical and operational problems an unbalanced system microbiology can be the reason for failure or suboptimal fermentation processes and reduced biogas yields. According to current knowledge it can be assumed that in biogas reactors there are differently structured and also temporally and spatially varying microbial communities without impairing the performance. As for this reason an "optimal" biogas community is impossible to define, an alternative approach for identifying microorganisms, particularly process affecting species, is the detailed characterization of the sytem microbiology in case of fermentation or process failures, where possible on practice scale. However, these tasks are difficult to implement, because plant operators are not willing to compromise well performing systems by a variation of the process. Also, in practice, disturbances are difficult to predict in advance. Long-term observations of individual biogas plants are associated with a high logistic effort without guaranteeing the presence of process disturbances in the observation period.
Funding
Bundesministerium für Ernährung und Landwirtschaft (BMEL)
Funding agency
Fachagentur Nachwachsende Rohstoffe e.V. (FNR)
Grant agreement number
22013913