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 recovet1' potential of sewage sludge in Malaysia through biogas
generation". This research v.~ll 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
1 billion 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.