Applications of Agricultural Wastes on Bio-hydrogen Production with Bacterial Treatments
1 7
Shao-Yi Hsia ’% Shiuh-Kuang Yang
2
and Huan-Chen Kuo
department of Mechanical & Automation Engineering,
Kao-Yuan University, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan department of Mechanical and Electro-Mechanical Engineering,
National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan
Abstract
At the present time, the demand for energy, goods, and materials is surging because of advanced technology and population growth. However, earth’s resources are limited. For this reason, the issues concerning using resources effectively and converting them into energy are important. Taiwan creates a vast amount of agricultural waste every year, which is traditionally burned and buried. We do not reuse and recycle agricultural waste, and air pollution is increased when wastes are burned. Therefore, it is necessary to create methods for recycling and reusing agricultural wastes and to transform them into an energy source. This chapter is separated into two parts. The first part will convert agricultural waste into sugar. Agricultural waste is replete with wood fiber that can be reduced into sugar by a microbial method. The second part will use the biological hydrogen production capability of Clostridium acetobutylicum ATCC824, with sugar being added to the process. Also, this chapter used ultrasonic treatment for the production of biological hydrogen and calculated the natural frequency of ATCC824. The experiment was designed using the Taguchi method for increasing hydrogen production by using an ultrasonic treatment. Our results showed that the best combination is a temperature of 37 °C, 0.5 MHz ultrasonic frequency, 136 mW/cm2 ultrasonic intensity, 10 s exposure time, pH 7.5, and a bacterial concentration of 20%. The outcome of our research can be applied to the production of biomass energy and the research and
Corresponding author: syhsia@cc kyu.edu.tw.
development of ripening techniques for accelerating fermentable food with biomechatronics.
Keywords: agricultural waste, bacterial, biological hydrogen production, ultrasonic, Taguchi method
