Improving anaerobic digestion stability, effluent quality and ammonia recovering with a microbial electrolysis cell integrated system

Abstract

Anaerobic digestion (AD) is nowadays widely used for processing various kinds of wastes, as livestock manure. Despite it is considered as a robust process, when it is performed at thermophilic range, beside a number of advantages, it is more sensitive to inhibition due to diverse substances that may be present in the waste stream, as ammonia. Furthermore, the AD process does not modify the total content of N of the digestates. So, it is interesting to find new technologies that can help to maintain effluent quality within the desired limits, while recovering nutrients from the digestates.