Pilot-scale Biogas Plant for the Research and Development of New Technologies

Ivan Simeonov (1) , Boyko Kalchev (1) , Snezhanka Mihaylova (1) , Venelin Hubenov (1) , Anatoliy Aleksandrov (2) , Rashko Georgiev (3) , Nicolai Christov (4)

1 Institut Stephan Angeloff
2 The Technical University of Gabrovo
3 Trakia University
4 SyNeR - Systèmes Non Linéaires et à Retards

Тhe paper describes a new pilot-scale biogas plant of the Institute of Microbiology - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The equipment includes: a 100 L pilot bioreactor, a 200 L metal gasholder, sensors, actuators, a two-level automatic process monitoring and control system, a fire and explosion protection system and two web cameras. The monitoring and control system is composed on the lower level of a controller Beckhoff, and on the higher level - of a PC with specialized software (under development). The pilot biogas plant is designed to work out and scale up various anaerobic digestion (AD) technologies based on different types of feedstock. All the data will be stored on the PC for quick reference and possibly data mining, parameter identification and verification of different AD mathematical models.

Keywords: AD; Biogas; Sensors; Monitoring and control system

Domains: Life Sciences [q-bio]; Microbiology and Parasitology

Ivan Simeonov, Boyko Kalchev, Snezhanka Mihaylova, Venelin Hubenov, Anatoliy Aleksandrov, et al.. Pilot-scale Biogas Plant for the Research and Development of New Technologies. International Journal of BIOautomation, 2012, 16 (3), pp.187-202. ⟨pasteur-00755366⟩