Online Experiment for Investigating Landfill Gas Production
Background
In Hong Kong, there are 3,400 tonnes of food waste sending to landfill every day, occupying 37% of total solid waste. Food waste is highly degradable among all solid waste (e.g. municipal waste, construction waste and chemical waste etc.). On one hand, it can easily cause odour and hygiene problems; on the other hand, it has a great potential for generating renewable energy – the Landfill gas utilization.
Landfill gas (biogas) which serves as a kind of excellent alternative energy, is mainly composed of methane gas (65%) offering high energy efficiency in combustion.
For the production of landfill gas, the essential process involves anaerobic breakdown of fatty acid, amino acid and sugars into methane gas (65%) and carbon dioxide gas (30%) by some anaerobic bacteria which do not need oxygen for growth. We have specifically designed and set up an online experiment to have long-time automatic collection of data for observing and analyzing the changes in gas level (methane and carbon dioxide) and pH level throughout the fermentation process with 4 sets of different methane inducers, namely (a) water, (b) Yakult (益力多active lactic acid bacteria beverage), (c) composter powder (廚餘粉) and (d) raw sewage (taken from sewage treatment plant).
Welcome to this courseware!
You need to provide your Student/Learner Number (8 digits with no prefix 's') in order to login and go through the self-learning activities (around 15 minutes in total). If you are a visitor, you are welcome to observe our experiment by selecting the "Observation only" with a visitor's code of 81818181.