Abstract:
Biogas is a renewable energy that is produced from organic waste. To enhance the calorific value
and better employ the biogas and eliminate undesirable parts from the raw biogas, it is important to
upgrade biogas by clean raw biogas so that the cleaned biogas is employed in high effective power
generation. In this study, biogas was produced from the vegetable and fruit wastes by employing
an anaerobic co-digester. Different process factors like total solids, pH, moisture content, volatile
solids, ash content, C:N ratio, and total nitrogen. The water displacement approach was used to
measure biogas generation and biogas analyzer approach was used to study methane composition
of the product. The wastes were digested for 28 days. The effects of the pH, C/N ratio, and
inoculum size on the biogas and methane generation were employed. In this work, chemical
absorption approach has been employed to upgrade biogas and to clarify H
2
S and CO
2
of biogas
and to enhance the methane content by using NaOH to remove CO
2
, activated carbon to remove
H2S, silica gel to remove the moisture. The result showed that the H
2S content was decreased by
87% and CO2
content was reduced 71%. This study confirmed that the upgraded biogas could be
employed for electricity generation.
Keywords: Biogas, chemical absorption, silica gel, activated carbon, NaOH