Thermal and oxidative disintegration of anaerobic digested sludge by solution plasma process

Solution plasma process (SPP) is promising for sludge disintegration, since the SPP only uses electric power and induces strongly oxidizing environments. In this study, the SPP using a capillary discharge that generating reactive oxygen species and heating solution was developed to assess the disintegration performance of anaerobic digested sludge. The SPP was compared with the thermal process (TP) which has only thermal contributions to evaluate the contributions of thermal and oxidative disintegration of sludge. Compared to the TP, under all tested conditions, the improved solubilization performance (up to 1.41, 1.84, and 6.55 times higher for overall COD, proteins, and carbohydrates, respectively) by the SPP was attributed to the oxidative effect (statistically significant, p