Graduation Semester and Year

2019

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Engineering in Civil Engineering

Department

Civil Engineering

First Advisor

Sahadat Hossain

Abstract

One of the major problems of urbanization is the production of a huge amount of Municipal Solid Waste. The cities and metropolitan areas are generating more and more solid waste and these wastes are filling up the landfill rapidly. Creating new landfills after a few years is not a solution as there is not much space in urban areas. Moreover, making the landfills far away from cities is not economically viable as longer hauling distance increases the cost. In this scenario, Bioreactor landfill is a viable solution to this problem. Bioreactor landfills can save a lot of space and it can become even more effective if the waste in the landfill can be decomposed faster. There are few methods to achieve faster degradation of the waste; among them, leachate recirculation is the most convenient way. Besides the leachate recirculation, added sludge and manures can provide nitrogen-rich, macro, and micronutrients for the microbial activities. In anaerobic conditions, the degradation of MSW was enhanced either by using sludge or animal manures as inoculum in previous studies. However, this study is done to measure the performance of chicken manures mixeded with sludge and wastewater on the degradation of municipal solid waste, which has not been conducted on laboratory scale reactors. Therefore, this study was performed to find the effects of the addition of chicken manure and sludge with wastewater recirculation in the degradation of MSW in laboratory simulated bioreactors and compare them with previous studies using other manures. In this study, six reactors were prepared with MSW, sludge and chicken manure. The reactors were operated at the University of Texas at Arlington in environmental growth chamber situated in Civil Engineering Laboratory Building at 100ºF and were checked frequently. The pH, BOD and COD measurements were performed on generated leachate. The gas volume and gas composition measurement were done regularly for 150 days. Based on the experimental results, reactors with chicken manure as inoculum showed better results compared to other reactors. The highest volume of CH4 was produced by reactors designated as W3 and W4 with chicken manure and sludge with wastewater recirculation, produced 49.14 L. and 45.1 L. with peak methane yield of 0.49 and 0.34 L/lb./day respectively. And, the percentage of weight reduced was found to be 57.76% and 57.55% for reactors W3 and W4 with chicken manure respectively. Thus, based on the experimental study, it was determined chicken manure has the potential to be applied as inoculum for enhancing the degradation of waste. Therefore, chicken manure is suggested as an economical and available inoculum for the Sustainable Bioreactor landfill.

Keywords

Chicken, Methane

Disciplines

Civil and Environmental Engineering | Civil Engineering | Engineering

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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