Professor The University of Texas at Arlington, TX
Abstract Description: Rural areas in many developing countries lack modern energy services and access to clean cooking technologies. Most of the rural population in these areas are forced to use traditional cooking resources like firewood and air-dried cattle manure. Use of these traditional technologies causes indoor air pollution and results in deforestation. A solution to this problem can be provided by using low-cost household/community digesters. In the resent years this technology has proved to be very successful in the rural areas of Latin America and Asia.
Livestock in most of these regions consist of guinea pigs, cows and llamas. Several studies have been done to study the potential of co-digestion using cow and guinea pig manure (Garfí, Ferrer-Martí, Perez, et al., 2011; Meneses Quelal et al., 2022). However, few studies have tested anaerobic digestion by guinea pig manure alone. Therefore, our study aimed to evaluate biogas production from anaerobic digestion of organic wastes using guinea pig manure compared to water resource recovery facility (WRRF) sludge as a baseline. Lab tests were conducted in batch-scale reactors (125 mL) containing rice husk and paper waste, inoculated with guinea pig manure or WRRF sludge, incubated at 30oC. Results over a period of 100 days show that guinea pig manure can solely be used to perform anaerobic digestion. Comparison of these results with digesters using wastewater sewage sludge is underway.
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