Influência de diferentes materiais suporte na produção de hidrogênio em reator anaeróbio de leito fluidizado

Abstract

Hydrogen is a clean and renewable source of energy and it is considered the "fuel of the future", because it produces only water during combustion and when it is used as fuel and hydrogen has a high energy yield of 122 kJ/g, which is 2.75 times greater than hydrocarbon fuels. The hydrogen production using microorganisms is a promising area of technological development from a wide variety of renewable and a alternative for this production is to use the anaerobic fluidized bed reactor (AFBR), a promising reactor for hydrogen production. One of the factors that most influence the performance of AFBR is the support material, which should provide resistance to abrasion, porous surface conducive to colonization by microorganisms, easy fluidization to reach and ability to facilitate the transfer of mass between the middle and biofilm. Thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate the influence of different support materials (polystyrene - R1, ground tire - R2 and PET - R3) for the hydrogen production, using three AFBR. Each reactor had a total volume of 4192 cm3, which was used as carbon source 4000 mg.L-1 of glucose, with pH influent around 7.0 and pH effluent of around 5.5, with hydraulic retention time (HRT) between 8 and 0.5 h, with temperature of 30 o C } 1, with heat treatment of the inoculum. The best performance was R2, giving better hydrogen yield production (HY) (2.15 mol-H2.mol-1-glucose), best H2 content in the biogas (52.97%) and showed a higher glucose conversion (90%). However, the R3 was better in the hydrogen production rate (HPR), 1.07 lh-1.L-1, a secondary parameter in the analysis of performance of the reactors. In all reactors, the production volume of hydrogen and H2 content in biogas increased with the reduction of the TDH, 8 pm to 1 HEO yield of hydrogen production increased with the reduction of the TDH, 8 h for 2 h. The major soluble metabolites during H2 fermentation were acetic acid (HAc), butyric acid (HBu), lactic acid (HLa) and ethanol (EtOH), and a small production of propionic acid and R2 was the reactor that more produced HAc and HBu (42.0% e 36.5%, respectively) . The better performance of R2 can be explained by the roughness of ground tire is larger than the other materials used, accumulating a large quantity of attached biomass, and a greater quantity of bacteria hydrogen producing. There was a predominance of bacilli like Clostridium sp. in the biofilm of all support materials.