Development of Integrated System for Biofuel Production from Tapioca Starch Wastes by Anaerobic Digestion and Hybrid Hydrothermal Carbonization

As the government has established a strategy for sustainable renewable energy development, in order to reduce dependence on energy from fossil fuel which are imported from abroad. This aim to increase the proportion of commercial consumption of renewable energy. Renewable energy sources are divided into 3 main uses: electricity (from solar, wind, water, waste, biomass), biofuels (from ethanol, biodiesel) and thermal energy. (from biogas, waste, biomass)

There are tons of residual from Thai agro-industrial, but the value of products that utilized agro-industrial residual is not high, for example, cassava pulp from the cassava starch production process are 10.8-17.4 million tons annually. Most are discarded or sold at low prices. to be mixed with other raw materials for animal feed

Therefore, this research will be a collaboration between King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi and Kinava Company, Korea to develop a method for adding value of cassava pulp to produce energy for replacing the use of electricity, Coal and fuel oil. The result of this not only lead to reduce energy costs and increase competitiveness of industry but also reduces carbon dioxide emission which is the most beneficial carbon cycling in the cassava processing industry.

The project conceptual is integration anaerobic digestion with hydrothermal carbonization. (hydrothermal carbonization) to turn the waste into bio-energy in the form of biogas and solid biofuel.

This research project consists of 2 technologies:

    The first part is biogas production technology (anaerobic digestion (AD) which is Thai researchers’ main responsibility. The cassava pulp fermentation operating conditions to obtain the optimum organic acid for methanogenesis will be studied for enhancing the efficiency of the biogas production. The digested cassava pulp will be delivered to the HTC system.

The second part is hydrothermal hybridization technology. (Hydrothermal carbonization; HTC) which is Korean researchers’ main responsibility. The first phase of project will be studying in Korea. To determine the optimum conditions for hydrochar production from cassava pulp and digested cassava pulp. Then in the third year, the pilot plant system will be moved from Korea to the factory in Thailand. To study the interaction between the AD system and HTC. The AD system takes wastewater from the HTC process to treat it and use it as feed stock for biogas production.