Acta Univ. Agric. Silvic. Mendelianae Brun. 2018, 66(5), 1151-1156 | DOI: 10.11118/actaun201866051151

Conductivity Measurement for Control of a Biogas Plant

Richard Klein, Vlastimil Slaný, Eva Krčálová

Department of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Technology, Faculty of AgriSciences, Mendel university in Brno, Zemedelska 1, 613 00 Brno, Czech Republic

Nowadays in these modern times, when the majority of technologies are dependent on electrical energy, it is necessary to build new sources of energy ecologically and still improve their efficiency. One of the branches, which can contribute to ecology, is biogas plants. When biogas production methods are properly applied in them, these biogas plants have two advantages. One of them is the disposal of biowaste, the other is the production of green electricity in cogeneration units. In this article, steps which will enable better control of biogas transformations are listed. Therefore, they will contribute to the eco biogas production. The innovative approach involves adding new control variable. This variable can be shown in advance of the reaction, as evidenced by the charts. Results for evaluation were measured in the bioreactor during 20 experiments. Most (14) experiments were identical with residues from wine. The residue measurement was performed on three experiments in the remaining biomaterials. The course of production of methane always copied progress conductivity. This fact is evident from the graphs on Figs. 2-4. The methods used for data processing were: removal creeping values, statistic methods (median, average) and interpolation. It can be concluded from the results that the conductivity of digestate predicts specific production of biogas.

Keywords: conductivity, biogas, automatization, pipe senzor

Grants and funding:

The research was financially supported by the AF-IGA IP 2016/44 - Proposal for monitoring process data in extreme environments and subsequent automated data processing. (In Czech: Návrh procesu monitoringu dat v exrémních prostředích a následné automatizované zpracování naměřených dat.)

Published: October 29, 2018  Show citation