Abstract
The poultry industry has the most formal employment in the region of Santander, Colombia and presents different challenges, especially in the energy part, because the prices of energy and fuels have high prices; In addition to this, it is a generator of residual sludge, especially in the processes of slaughtering birds for national consumption and export. This study shows the possibilities of the energetic use of residual sludge, by means of the implementation of an anaerobic bioreactor, which can generate biogas with high concentrations of methane, which can be used in boilers and other industrial uses.
This study analyses the flow of waste sludge from a slaughterhouse of chickens in the Bucaramanga metropolitan area, which slaughters sixty thousand chickens a day and has a wastewater treatment plant that operates with coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation and filtering using ferric chloride; According to the sludge flow, the bioreactor is designed and an operative simulation is made with the LabVIEW software, which allows to determine all the electronic control devices of the bioreactor, which will allow to maintain a constant temperature, a control on the income and expenses of the bioreactor and an operation very similar to reality, taking into account that this residual sludge has already been characterized and tested in a laboratory pilot reactor at the University of Santander.
This work deals with the implementation of an exploitation of biogas, derived from the microbiological activity of anaerobic microorganisms, to supply part of the fuel necessary for chicken slaughtering operations, besides this is a technological option for this industrial sector. The entire food industry in Santander, Colombia, has problems with sludge from wastewater treatment plants, but the use of this biologically derived fuel as part of its energy consumption has not been seriously explored. The methodology addressed gives us a clear vision of the true possibilities of the use of biogas in Colombia, because if you have different sources, but have not implemented plants that produce biogas for industrial use.
