[Gasification] Biogas from cow dung.

[Ajay Chandak]

Generating biogas from cow dung is very much practiced all over the world. Actually cow dung is not a very good feed material for the biogas, but it is available almost free and yields high quality manure slurry and that is why it is a preferred feed material. Cow dung has only 10% volatile solid which can be converted to biogas, and practically only 5-7 % can be converted. Also the hydraulic detention period is 45 days which makes plant bulky. Additional waste materials which are starchy are excellent feed materials. We tried with variety of food waste, hotel waste, waste flour, variety of deoiled cakes (especially non edible ones) almost all types of seeds, all fruit waste etc. All these are excellent feed material with very high percentage of volatile solids and hydraulic detention period less than 2 days.
My house is fossil fuel free. We are using solar cookers since last 6 years which cut down our fossil fuel consumption by 30% and now we got biogas plant installed since last two years and we are practically fossil fuel free. One restaurant near my house disposes off his food waste in this plant and we get enough gas for our family of nine (We are a combined family, my grandmother, mother, elder brother with his family and my family). In fact we have lot of surplus and requested our neighbours to take additional connection from this biogas. Hope they will do this month.

We also did few projects for hotels to digest food waste and generate biogas for their kitchen use. Most of the projects had payback within 18 months.

With some modification internal combustion engine works well. One can use gasolin engine with modified gas kit. 
Pretrement required: Gas scrubbing through water for CO2 absorption and passing the gas over iron oxide for removal of H2S is recommended.

Regards,

Prof. Ajay Chandak.
Certified Energy Auditor & Renewable Energy Consultant.
PRINCE (Promoters & Researchers In Non Conventional Energy) www.princeindia.org 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tapera Mangezi" <mangezit at wattle.co.zw>
To: "Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification" <gasification at listserv.repp.org>
Sent: 24 April, 2008 8:31 PM
Subject: [Gasification] Biogas from cow dung.


> Is it feasible to produce biogas from cow dung and how can you best utilise
> the gas produced?How can it be pretreated to run an internal combustion
> engine?
> 
> 
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