Hydrogen production from alcohol wastewater with added fermentation residue by an anaerobic sequencing batch reactor (ASBR) under thermophilic operation

The objective of this study was to investigate the enhancement of hydrogen production from alcohol wastewater by adding fermentation residue using an anaerobic sequencing batch reactor (ASBR) under thermophillic operation (55 °C) and at a constant pH of 5.5. The digestibility of the added fermentation residue was also evaluated. For a first set of previous experiments, the ASBR system was operated to obtain an optimum COD loading rate of 50.6 kg/m3 d of alcohol wastewater without added fermentation residue and the produced gas contained 31% H2 and 69% CO2. In this experiment, the effect of added fermentation residue (100–1200 mg/l) on hydrogen production performance was investigated under a COD loading rate of 50.6 kg/m3 d of the alcohol wastewater. At a fermentation residue concentration of 1000 mg/l, the produced gas contained 40% H2 and 60% CO2 without methane and the system gave the highest hydrogen yield and specific hydrogen production rate of 128 ml/g COD removed and 2880 ml/l d, respectively. Under thermophilic operation with a high total COD loading rate (51.8 kg/m3 d) and a short HRT (21 h) at pH 5.5, the ASBR system could only break down cellulose (41.6%) and hemicellulose (21.8%), not decompose lignin.