Alkaline pretreatment of tannery wastewater impact on biochemical methane potential tests: experimental study and kinetic modeling

Studies were carried out on anaerobic digestion of tannery wastewater obtained from leather processing. Degassed activated sludge biomass collected from a wastewater treatment plant was used as source of microorganisms. The study was carried out to examine the impact of alkaline pretreatment on a real tannery wastewater prior anaerobic digestion process. Bio-methane potential tests were conducted at 35±2°C on tannery wastewater pretreated by adding different volumes of 2N NaOH solution up to set pH values at 9, 10, 11, and 12, respectively. NaOH solution addition resulted in a partial removal of total Cr showing efficiency from 16.84 to 95.72% as well as in an increase of the soluble chemical oxygen demand concentration from 8.53 to 29.02%. The effects of this pretreatment affected significantly the results obtained with bio-methane potential tests that showed methane production from all the pretreated tannery wastewater samples much higher than from that unpretreated. Finally, the lag phase duration and the maximum specific methane production rate of the anaerobic digestion process were evaluated by fitting the experimental results from bio-methane potential tests with the following three models: (i) the modified Gompertz model, (ii) the Logistic function, and (iii) the Richards model. All the previous models showed a high level of accordance with the experimental data, even though Richards model resulted in being the most accurate.