Enhancing The Methane Production From Biogas Effluent Of Palm Oil Mill Using Microbial Electrolysis Cell

The palm oil industry is a very important in a Southern Thailand’s economy but during processing of oil palm process, it produce too much wastewater (Palm oil mill effluent; POME). Many factories use POME as substrate in biogas production as a treatment for the effluent, but the effluent after treating by biogas processing still have high chemical oxygen demand (COD). Therefore, the wastewater with a high COD value is suggested to treated with microbial electrolysis cell or MEC, a process that uses electrical energy from an external energy source to catalyse internal biological reactions. MEC increases the efficiency of the removal of organic matter by microorganisms and can continue to produce biogas. This research aims to study the effect of feeding electricity into the MEC system for treating the synthetic wastewater on biomethane production efficiency based on analysis of results obtained by feeding 0.7, 1.0, and 1.3 V currents into 2 serum bottles with electrodes and 3 serum bottles without electrodes for 23 days. The result exhibited that methane production using MEC with applying 0.7 V give an 8.50% higher daily cumulative CH4 production than control set and methane production using MEC with applying 1.0 and 1.3 V give 0.76% and 2.56% lower daily cumulative CH4 production than control set. It can be concluded that by applying 0.7 V to MEC could enhance the methane production.