Controlling Attachment of Methanogens for Improved Anaerobic Digestion

Anaerobic digestion has become a key technology to enable energy recovery from organic matter streams in wastewater treatment remit. Some of the problems in anaerobic digestion is that the biomass that forms methane is “delicate” both in terms of environmental conditions and availability of nutrients and organic matter for metabolism. One way of improving the survival of these organisms is to cultivate them deliberately in biofilm environments.

Work has been done by Catherine Biggs to characterise the biofilm formation potential and mechanisms for these bacteria in single species biofilm. The objective for this PhD studentship is to move this work forward to understanding the behaviour of methane producing bacteria in multispecies biofilm. The purpose of this is to enable the development of new stable anaerobic digestion systems that is easier to adapt to different situations and can therefore also be applied at different scales than current systems. This work ties in with a current STREAM project in Sheffield on the role of food waste disposers in circular economy, supervised by Andy Nichols and Henriette Jensen. It also related to work underway on Methane production in septic tanks in China, a collaboration between Henriette Jensen and Prof. Yanchen Liu at Tsinghua university in China.