Thermally assisted bio-drying of food waste: Synergistic enhancement and energetic evaluation

Abstract Recently, bio-drying is becoming a promising method to treat the slurry-type food waste together with recovering refused derived fuels (RDFs). In practice, however, conventional process frequently encountered low temperature and inefficient drying performance due to the low microbial activity and organics degradability. In order to improve bio-drying performance, in this study, an externally thermal assistant strategy was proposed to increase water evaporation and stimulate microbial degradability. Based on this idea, a series of experiments were conducted to establish, evaluate and optimize the thermally assisted bio-drying system. It was found that staged heating acclimation was an effective strategy to obtain a superior thermophilic inoculum with high metabolic activity and microbial consortia. In thermally assisted bio-drying process, an extremely high metabolic activity [cumulative OUR, 38.98 mg/(g TS·h)] was obtained, which was greatly higher than that of conventional bio-drying [19.74 mg/(g TS·h)]. Furthermore, thermally assisted bio-drying exhibited a high water-evaporation capacity as thermal drying (157.9 g vs. 147.8 g), which was 3-fold higher than conventional bio-drying. Heat balance calculation indicated that externally supplying a small fraction (12.94%) of thermal energy triggered conventional bio-drying, thus greatly promoting water removal with high energy utilization efficiency as conventional bio-drying (Q evapo 60.30% vs. 64.62%). In addition, the increased air-flow rates greatly accelerated water removal with high bio-energy efficiencies, especially at 0.8 L·min −1 ·kg −1 . The drying effect after 4 days was close to that of 20 days in conventional bio-drying. This research suggests that thermally assisted bio-drying is a promising approach to upgrade conventional bio-drying with high efficiency and low energy cost.