A new approach for an efficient and flexible control of biogas production in a full scale plant

The relevance of energy production on a biomethane-basis has continuously increased during the last decades. Therefore, the necessity for a reliable, efficient and flexible production of methane from organic substrate requires a better understanding of the complete anaerobe digestion process and its control. The currently available models are not covering all sub-processes. In addition, the parameters of these models are difficult to identify. Here, a new approach for an efficient and flexible control for a predictable and demand meeting production of biogas in a full scale plant is presented. In a first step a new, detailed metabolic pathway is drawn, showing all branches, intercellular intermediates, and products of metabolism. This is going to be aligned with the existing Anaerobic Digestion Model No. 1 (ADM1). So, missing paths and dependencies can be added. In a second step, the lack of parameter knowledge is met by measurements from additional state of the art sensors in a full scale plant. Pattern recognition methods are then used on the large data stream in order to find correlations between the dataset entries and predict the expected biogas production. The obtained models can then be used to evaluate different control strategies making the biogas production more reliable and flexible.