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

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.