An investigation on the energy recovery potential of sewage sludge in Malaysia through biogas generation

In a world where energy is being a primary concern, extracting energy from waste has been a common interest in world today which is striving for energy. The research title is ―An investigation on the energy recovery potential of sewage sludge in Malaysia through biogas generation”. This research will be focused mainly on recovering energy through biogas generation while using sewage sludge as the feed source. Sewage sludge is basically produced from the treatment of domestic wastewater and consists of two basic forms which is raw primary sludge (basically faecal material) and secondary sludge (a living ‗culture‘ of organisms that help remove contaminants from wastewater before it is returned to rivers or the sea). The material that remains after the digestion process is referred to as biosolids. The main purpose of coming up with this research is because the current cost of disposing sewage sludge in Malaysia is around 1billion ringgit annually. There is also very limited landfill land that is available now in Malaysia for the sludge disposal. Sludge cannot be dispose freely and need a proper disposal method as it contains bacteria and can cause health problem. Based on all this causes, this research concentrate on reducing the sludge content and at the same time extract energy from the waste which is in this case is sewage sludge. Based on the background study, anaerobic digestion method has been identified as the most efficient process that can be applied to recover energy from domestic sewage sludge and at the same time reduce the sludge content as well. This finding is explained in the report below. Anaerobic digestion is basically a natural process that occurs from the breakdown of organic material by micro-organisms in the absence of oxygen. This digestion process reduces the primary sludge content, and the byproduct of this will be biogas. In order to carry out this project, a simulation of anaerobic digestion plant will be designed using HYSYS simulation. In this research, this simulation will be studied thoroughly to get the most output from the applied feed rate. Later from the simulation the amounts of electrical energy that can be recovered from the biogas will be calculated. The outcome of this result will conclude the potential of recovering energy from sewage sludge. Therefore, this study of energy recovery potential through biogas generation by using sewage sludge becomes economically and ecologically attractive for us in Malaysia.