Anaerobic digestion of wine lees

Arenas Sevillano CB, Chiappero M, Gomez X, Fiore S, Martínez EJ (2020) Improving the anaerobic digestion of wine-industry liquid wastes: Treatment by electro-oxidation and use of biochar as an additive. Energies 2020, 13(22), 5971. https://doi.org/10.3390/en13225971.

Abstract: Wine lees have a great potential to obtain clean energy in the form of biogas through anaerobic digestion due to their high organic load. However, wine lees are a complex substrate and may likely give rise to instabilities leading to failure of the biological process. This work analysed the digestion of wine lees using two different approaches. First, electro-oxidation was applied as pre-treatment using boron-doped diamond-based electrodes. The voltage was 25 V and different treatment times were tested (ranging from 0.08 to 1.5 h) at 25 °C. Anaerobic digestion of wine lees was evaluated in batch tests to investigate the effect of electro-oxidation on biogas yield. Electro-oxidation exhibited a significant positive effect on biogas production increasing its value up to 330 L kg⁻¹ of volatile solids after 1.5 h of treatment, compared to 180 L kg⁻¹ of volatile solids measured from raw wine lees. As a second approach, the addition of biochar to the anaerobic digestion of wine lees was investigated; in the experimental conditions considered in the present study, the addition of biochar did not show any positive effect on anaerobic digestion performance.

Link to journal article (open access): https://doi.org/10.3390/en13225971.

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