Kinetic Analysis and Treatment of Compost Leachate Using Data from a Plant-Scale Hybrid Anaerobic Reactor

Abstract

Compost leachate is one of the most strongly polluting wastewaters, which is found in significantly large amounts. The major objective of this research was to study the biological treatment of compost leachate in an upflow–downflow hybrid anaerobic reactor, located in a compost production plant designed to process 200 t/day of urban solid waste. A range of models based on different kinetics have been tested using the experimental data from measurements taken from the hybrid anaerobic reactor. The substrate removal using the second-order rate (k2(s)) was found to be 22.3 day–1. The rate constant (Umax) for maximum removal and the constant (KB) for the saturation value for the Stover–Kincannon model was determined to be 90.9 and 97.3 g/L·day, respectively, which resulted in the best fitting of this model to the actual compost leachate plant data.