Biogas Yields Variance from Anaerobic Co-Digestion of Cow Dung with Jatropha Cake Under Mesophilic Temperatures

Abstract

Anaerobic co-digestion requires the digestion of two or more homogenous substrates to produce biogas. The superlative participated condition is when principal amount of most important substrate (example manure or sewage sludge) is combined and fermented with each other with lesser quantities of single, or a variety of additional substrate. The co-digestion of one or more substrates commonly improves the biogas output from anaerobic digesters owing to positive improvement brought about in the digestion medium and the furnishing of missing nutrients in one substrate by another. Anaerobic co-digestion of cow dung and jatropha cake for biogas production was carried out in the batch digester in the absence of oxygen at ambient temperature with different mixing ratios for 40 days. The result indicated that treatment with 75% jatropha 25% cow dung had the highest volume of biogas at the rate of 24.41% and treatment with 100% jatropha released has the highest percentage quality of biogas produced (methane) at the rate of 59.6%. Treatment with 50% cow dung 50% jatropha cake was found to be the appropriate mix ratio, since it was rank 2 ^nd in both qualitative and quantitative analytical point of view from the experiment performed.