RT Journal Article
T1 Classical Batch Distillation of Anaerobic Digestate to Isolate Ammonium Bicarbonate: Membrane Not Necessary!
A1 Moure Abelenda, Alejandro
A1 Baltrusaitis, Jonas
K1 Crystallization
K1 Commercial-grade fertilizer
K1 Manure management
K1 Circular economy
K1 Mitigation technology
AB The excessive mineralization of organic molecules during anaerobic fermentation increases the availability of nitrogen and carbon. For this reason, the development of downstream processing technologies is required to better manage ammonia and carbon dioxide emissions during the storage and land application of the resulting soil organic amendment. The present work investigated classical distillation as a technology for valorizing ammoniacal nitrogen (NH4+-N) in anaerobic digestate. The results implied that the direct isolation of ammonium bicarbonate (NH4HCO3) was possible when applying the reactive distillation to the food waste digestate (FWD) with a high content of NH4+-N, while the addition of antifoam to the agrowaste digestate (AWD) was necessary to be able to produce an aqueous solution of NH4HCO3 as the distillate. The reason was that the extraction of NH4HCO3 from the AWD required a higher temperature (>95 °C) and duration (i.e., steady state in batch operation) than the recovery of the inorganic fertilizer from the FWD. The titration method, when applied to the depleted digestate, offered the quickest way of monitoring the reactive distillation because the buffer capacity of the distillate was much higher. The isolation of NH4HCO3 from the FWD was attained in a transient mode at a temperature below 90 °C (i.e., while heating up to reach the desired distillation temperature or cooling down once the batch distillation was finished). For the operating conditions to be regarded as techno-economically feasible, they should be attained in the anaerobic digestion plant by integrating the heat harvested from the engines, which convert the biogas into electricity.
PB MDPI
SN 2306-5354
YR 2024
FD 2024-11-15
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10347/41840
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10347/41840
LA eng
NO Moure Abelenda, A.; Baltrusaitis, J. Classical Batch Distillation of Anaerobic Digestate to Isolate Ammonium Bicarbonate: Membrane Not Necessary! Bioengineering 2024, 11, 1152. https://doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering11111152
NO This research was funded by the Doctoral Prize of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK, award reference number 1945857. The writing up was completed with the support of the grant JDC2022-048389-I, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.
DS Minerva
RD 4 may 2026