The bioproduction of materials and energy from renewable sources (industrial biotechnology) is
getting more and more interest in order to improve environmental sustainability of chemical
industrial processes and to decrease their dependence from oil. Anaerobic digestion of organic
waste matrices (agricultural and industrial wastes, organic fraction of municipal wastes, sewage
sludges etc.) may play an important role in the implementation of industrial biotechnology being a
well developed strategy in the valorization of complex matrices, as it can mineralize them while
producing bioenergy in the form of a biogas rich in methane.
In this research the potential of anaerobic digestion in the treatment of polluted sewage sludge was
studied by developing three set of anaerobic microcosms with sludges differently contaminated by
xenobiotic compounds. The effect of different incubating temperatures and of exogenous carbon
and vitamine sources was investigated along with the role of the occurring microbial populations in
the pollutant degradation activity. So, while confirming the potential of anaerobic digestion for the
biomethanization of sewage sludges, this work proved the effectiveness of this technology in the
removal of pollutants too.
Moreover, since the degradation of lignocellulose appears to be a limiting step in the anaerobic
treatment of a wide range of biomass, the possibility of optimizing anaerobic digestion of
lignocellulosic substrates was also studied. To this aim a research was carried out at the BOKUUniversity
of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Department for Agrobiotechnology,
IFA - Tulln, where mixed cellulolytic cultures were isolated from biogas plants while assessing the
metabolic pathway leading to cellulose degradation and verifying their capability to grow on
lignocellulose too, proving that on the long term such bacterial cultures could be used as inoculum
in order to improve the hydrolysis of lignocellulose in anaerobic digestion plants.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unibo.it/oai:amsdottorato.cib.unibo.it:638 |
| Date | 05 May 2008 |
| Creators | Capodicasa, Serena <1980> |
| Contributors | Marchetti, Leonardo |
| Publisher | Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna |
| Source Sets | Università di Bologna |
| Language | Italian |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess |
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