Nutrient Recovery from Digestate of Agricultural Biogas Plants: A Comparative Study of Innovative Biocoal-Based Additives in Laboratory and Full-Scale Experiments

Abstract

Nutrients can be recovered from the digestate of an agricultural biogas plant in the form of solid fraction and serve as crop fertilizers. Removal of suspended solids with screw press separators is the most commonly used technique for treating digestate from biogas plants. To increase separation efficiency and nutrient transfer to the solid phase during separation, eight biocoal-based additives were investigated, which were based on beech wood and produced by pyrolysis at temperatures of 350 °C and 600 °C. Four of the biocoals were impregnated with CaCl2 or MgCl2 before pyrolysis. The reaction time between the additives and the digestate varied from 5 min to 2 weeks. The application of MgCl2-impregnated biocoal synthesized at 600 °C for 20 h increased the nutrient removal efficiency by 76.33% for ammonium and 47.15% for phosphorus, compared to the control (the untreated digestate).