The DARIES Model: Modeling Co-Digestion and Multi-Phase Digester

Systems

by
Ian T. McCrum

Clarkson University

The DARIES Model: Modeling Co-Digestion and Multi-Phase Digester Systems

A Thesis Proposal by
Ian T. McCrum
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Mentor:
Dr. Stefan Grimberg
3/6/2011

Introduction
In 2007 the 71,510 dairy farms in the United States generated roughly 225 million metric tons of
dairy manure (Liebrand et al., 2009). This is even greater than the 208 million metric tons of municipal
solid waste generated in the United States in 2001 (Green and Perry, 2007). While this is an enormous
amount of manure, it is put to use. This dairy manure is typically collected, stored, and spread onto crop
land. While manure is high in nitrogen and phosphorus, making it an excellent fertilizer, over application
of manure can cause high concentrations of these nutrients to leach into local water sources, causing
damage. (US EPA, 1995) This manure may also contain pathogens and the spreading of manure can lead
to contamination of crops. Due to these drawbacks, land application of manure has recently come under
question as a standard manure disposal practice (Welsh et al., 2010). Other treatment methods are being
considered, including anaerobic digestion.
Anaerobic digestion is a natural process than can be used to treat this manure and make it safer
for land application. In the digestion process, groups of bacteria that are naturally found in manure will
consume organic material in the manure and produce methane and carbon dioxide, all while stabilizing
nutrients. The methane and carbon dioxide gas mixture, typically known as biogas, can be burned to
produce renewable heat and/or electricity. Nutrient stabilization by the bacteria produces a product that is
much safer for land application than the original manure and often the nutrients are converted to a form
much more accessible to plants and crops (Liebrand et al., 2009). Also, many of the pathogens found in
manure are destroyed in the digestion process.
While anaerobic digestion has many benefits, implementation of a digestion system is capital
intensive. This has limited digester use on dairy farms, with only 95 systems operating in the United
States in 2007 (Liebrand et al., 2009). Due to the high initial cost the USDAs AgStar program, which
was designed to help farmers implement anaerobic digesters, suggests that anaerobic digesters can only
be cost effective on dairy farms milking more than 500 dairy cows (US AgSTAR, 2004). This would limit
the use of digesters to only 5% of all dairy farms within the United States (USDA, 2009).
Anaerobic digesters are common to wastewater treatment plants to treat sewage sludge and with
such widespread use many researchers have developed mathematical models to model anaerobic digestion
of this sewage sludge. These models can be used to assist in designing and especially in operating
anaerobic digesters. One model in particular, Anaerobic Digestion Model #1 was designed for this
purpose. The model, developed by the International Water Association, has been implemented in a
MATLAB/SIMULINK environment by researchers at Lund University in Sweden (Rosen et al., 2006).
This anaerobic digestion model has been used to create a complete combined heat and power digester
system model. This model, The Dynamic Anaerobic Reactor and Integrated Energy System (DARIES)
Model, is a dynamic model that uses ADM1 to predict biogas flow, a engine/generator model to convert
that biogas to heat and power, a water heater model to use biogas and waste engine heat to heat the
digester, and hourly weather data to model heat loss from the digester. The ADM1 model within DARIES
has been modified to model dairy manure (Brouwer, 2010).
With the high capital cost of farm scale digesters, much research has been conducted to increase
methane production, a valuable byproduct, thereby decreasing the amount of time needed to pay back the
initial cost of the digestion system. This research includes digesting other wastes with dairy manure and
optimizing reactor design. Co-digestion entails digesting other wastes, such as food waste with dairy
manure. This organic material contains much more energy than dairy manure and its digestion with
manure can increase the gas production rate of a digester relative to a digester of the same volume only
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digesting dairy manure. Different reactor systems have also been investigated. These systems include
phased reactors, where different groups of bacteria are housed in separate reactors. The ability to tailor the
environment of each reactor to the specific group of bacteria within the reactor can often increase
digestion efficiency (Demirer and Chen, 2004). Since anaerobic digestion models have only recently be
used to model dairy manure digestion, model development to include co-digestion with manure and
complex reactor setups has been limited.
The goal of this research will be to expand the Dynamic Anaerobic Reactor and Integrated
Energy System (DARIES) model to improve its ability to model the co-digestion of organic wastes with
dairy manure and to model multi-stage anaerobic reactor designs. An accurate computer model of the
complete process can be used to improve the operation of already designed anaerobic digesters. The
model can also be used to assist in process design to help engineer more cost-effective and less capital
intensive reactor designs. The design and implementation of a lower cost digestion system would allow
the process to be implemented on a greater number of farms, allowing more dairy farmers access to this
sustainable technology. Also, the model could be used to elucidate process dynamics and expand on
information gathered from laboratory scale experiments about the biochemical/physical processes that
occur within an anaerobic digester.
Background
Anaerobic Digestion Process
Anaerobic digestion is a biological treatment process in which certain groups and types of
microorganisms break down organic wastes. During this process complex organic matter is broken into
simpler products, including the gases methane and carbon dioxide. This mixture of methane and carbon
dioxide is often referred to as biogas, and is typically 60% methane, 40% carbon dioxide, and trace
amounts of other gases such as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and water vapor (Liebrand et al., 2009).
There are considered to be four stages or steps of anaerobic digestion, each stage carried out by a
different group of anaerobic bacteria. These steps can be viewed as sequential and include hydrolysis,
acidogenesis, acetogenesis, and methanogenisis. The first step, hydrolysis, is primarily an extracellular
process where enzymes break down complex carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids into simple monomers
such as sugars, amino acids, and long chain fatty acids. In the next step, acidogenic bacteria convert these
simple compounds into short chain fatty acids such as acetic, propionic, and butyric acids. In
acetogenesis, acetogenic bacteria convert some of the monomers and the short chain fatty acids into
acetic acid and hydrogen. Finally methanogenic bacteria, including aceticlastic methanogens and
hydrogenotrophic methanogens convert acetic acid/acetate and hydrogen respectively into methane and
carbon dioxide (Batstone, 2002).
These groups of bacteria are all found in dairy manure and are involved in the natural digestion
process within a dairy cow (Metcalf and Eddy, 2003). Therefore, as long as the dairy manure is kept free
of oxygen and is kept at a suitable temperature, these bacteria will continue to grow and thrive in the
manure, producing methane and carbon dioxide gas. To carry out the digestion process on a farm to
capture this gas, the manure is typically pumped into a sealed reactor where is resides for some set
amount of time and then continuously moves out of the reactor. The reactor is commonly heated to one of
two ranges of temperature. In one range, around 37C, mesophilic bacteria grow, while in reactors heated
around 45C, thermophilic bacteria grow (Liebrand et al., 2009). For a continuous process there are
primarily two reactor designs that are used in farm scale digesters in the United States. In 2005, 53% of
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farm scale digesters utilized a plug flow reactor design and 28% used some form of completely mixed
reactor (USDA, 2005).
Reactor Design and Operating Conditions
The most common design, a plug flow reactor, is simply a long tank with a cover. Manure is
pumped in one end of the tank and flows through the tank as a plug of manure, where no mixing occurs.
This plug travels through the tank, its residence time being determined by the volume of the plug flow
reactor and the volumetric flow rate of incoming manure. The manure then exits the tank and is typically
separated to recover valuable fibers and the liquid is stored and land applied. Because the manure moves
through the tank as a plug, plug flow reactors are typically used to treat high solids waste such as
undiluted dairy manure. Manure containing between 11% and 13% solids is typically digested within a
plug flow type reactor (US AgSTAR 2004). The second type of reactor is known as a completely stirred
tank reactor. In this reactor a mixer, or some sort of mixing mechanism is provided to continuously mix
the manure. The manure resides in the tank for some amount of time, produces biogas, then exits the
reactor and is treated the same as the treated manure leaving a plug flow reactor. Because this reactor is
mixed, this design is typically used for lower solids concentration waste, such as diluted dairy manure of
around 3% to 10% total solids (US AgSTAR 2004).
While the majority of farm scale digesters are one of these two reactor types, there are many other
types and configurations of reactors that have been designed. In 2005, 18 anaerobic digestion systems
used a covered lagoon reactor. This is one of the simplest types of reactors and is often constructed by
placing flexible covers over already existing lagoons or troughs used to store manure before land
application. In this way, biogas can be collected for profitable use (US AgSTAR 2005). A less common
type of reactor is one in which the bacterial consortia are attached to some media and wastewater is
passed up or down through the media in a vertical tank. This is known as an attached media or anaerobic
filter process, and is limited to treating wastewaters of very low solids concentrations, of less than 3%
total solids. Another reactor type common to treating high strength, low solids industrial wastewater, is
the up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor. Waste is fed into the bottom of a vertical reactor
where the upward flow of fluid keeps a blanket of bacteria coated particles floating near the top of the
reactor. As waste flows through this blanket bacteria on the particles treat the waste.
Multi-stage reactors and more complex configurations of reactors are also used in the biological
treatment of wastewaters. In the anaerobic contact process, after waste is anaerobically digested, the
waste enters a sort of separator where solids are settled out of the waste and recycled back into the
anaerobic digester. By recycling solids, the bacteria on the solids are recycled back into the digestion
process. This increases the efficiency of the digester as organic matter in the wastewater does not need to
be consumed to produce new bacteria and is used solely to produce biogas. Anaerobic digesters can also
be phased. In a temperature phased process a thermophilic reactor first treats wastewater, then the
wastewater flow into a larger mesophilic digester. Typically the combined volume of the reactors can be
reduced relative to a single stage mesophilic digester treating the same amount of wastewater. Also,
because the different groups of bacteria involved in the digestion process thrive best in different
environments, acidic and methane phased digestion systems can be used to increase efficiency of the
process. In a bacteria-phased process the wastewater firsts enters an acid phase where the first three
groups of bacteria grow, as they produce acids and can tolerate a lower pH then methanogenic bacteria.
These first groups can also grow at a faster rate than the methanogens, allowing the first reactor to be
small and have a shorter residence time. The broken down and fatty acid containing wastewater then
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enters a methanogenic reactor where the last group of bacteria converts the acids produced in the first
phase into biogas (Venkiteshwaran, 2010). Because each reactors environment can be tailored for the
different groups of bacteria involved in the digestion process two-stage digesters can be operated at
shorter residence times and at higher efficiencies, thereby producing more biogas at a higher rate. When
digesting fibers such as grass silage, it has been found that in a one stage system only 20% of the methane
potential of the fibers was realized but in a two stage system 66% of the potential was realized
(Lehtomaki et al., 2008). Demirer and Chen found that the use of a two phase reactor system with a total
residence time of 10 days produced 67% more biogas than a one stage system treating the same dairy
manure at a residence time of 20 days. The process also showed increased stability (Demirer and Chen,
2005). Much research has been focused on increasing the gas production rate of anaerobic digestion
processes. This research includes co-digestion where in other organic wastes are broken down with
wastewaters such as dairy manure.
Co-Digestion
Co-digestion has been investigated with manure wastewaters and high strength organic wastes
such as cheese whey, glycerol, food waste, municipal waste, and also fibrous wastes such as energy crops.
Li studied the co-digestion of kitchen waste with dairy manure at a volatile solids mixing ratio of 1:1. The
cumulative gas production from the 1:1 mixture was 44% higher than the combined gas production of the
digestion of dairy manure and kitchen waste separately, illustrating the synergistic effects of co-digestion
(Li et al., 2009). In a pilot scale reactor digesting poultry waste, dilute cheese whey was added in such as
way as to keep the chemical oxygen demand (COD) of the feed constant. This resulted in a 40% increase
in the gas production rate, as a result of a better C:N ratio of the feed and the higher biodegradability of
the carbohydrates in the cheese whey relative to lipids in manure (Gelegenis et al., 2007). Including grass,
sugar beet tops, or straw up with dairy manure up to 30% of digester feedstock with dairy manure
increased the methane production per digester volume by 16-60% above what was produced from manure
alone (Lehtomaki, 2007). The addition of potato starch to the digestion of dairy manure doubled the
methane production rate per unit of digester volume as compared to manure alone (Clemens et al., 2006).
It should also be noted that many researchers have found that an increase the percentage of co-digestion
material in the feed above 40-50% results in a decrease in methane and biogas production (Lehtomaki,
2007). Co-digestion can also be performed in multi-stage systems, thereby combining the benefits of both
co-digestion and multi-stage systems.
Research into the co-digestion of wastes with dairy manure in multi-stage systems, while
somewhat limited, has shown that such a process can also provide a greater gas production rate than
single stage digestion of dairy manure alone. Li et al. demonstrated that the co-digestion of food waste
with dairy manure in a two phase system resulted in a gas production rate of 80% to 550% higher than in
digesting dairy manure alone. The two phase system also resulted in increased stability and could keep its
high performance at a short system residence time of 13 days (Li et al., 2010). Increasing the gas
production rate and decreasing the residence time required to anaerobically digest dairy manure would
increase the revenue to the digester operator and decrease the capital cost required to construct the
system, respectively.

Farm Scale Anaerobic Digestion History and Economics

One of the first recorded uses of the anaerobic digestion process was at a leper colony in Bombay,
India, in 1859 (Demirbas, 2006). For about the last century anaerobic digestion has seen widespread use
in treating industrial and municipal wastewaters, but interest in farm scale anaerobic digesters didnt
begin until the 1970s (Lusk, 1999). Since then the growth of the farm based digester industry has been
slow, with roughly 160 digesters operating on dairy and swine farms in the United States, as of November
2010 (US EPA Agstar, 2010). It is believed that this slow growth is primarily due to the high capital costs
required to start a digestion project, lack of knowledge about operating these systems, and sometimes
unfounded fears of system failure and the amount of time required by the operator to keep a system
running. The limited implementation may also be due to the fact that it is believed that current digestion
systems are only cost-effective on large dairy farms with more than 500 dairy cows, while these farms
represent only 5% of the total number of dairy farms in the United States (USDA, 2009).
A survey of upstate New York dairy farmers indicated that farmers from farms of all herd sizes
were interested in anaerobic digestion technology, the only main concern these farmers had was over the
high capital cost of the systems (Gremelspacher et al., 2008). Welsh et al. found that the thought that this
technology can only be economically implemented on large dairy farms, termed a scale bias, is of
political and social origin and not of engineering origin. While this doesnt change the fact that digestion
systems typically have high initial costs, it does impact the ease and ability of farmers to secure loans to
pay for the costs of these systems. It has been estimated that the capital cost of a digester system to treat
the waste from 500 cows is around $950 per cow (Welsh et al., 2010).
While co-digestion and multi-phase systems have been in fairly widespread use in treating
municipal sewage, these innovations have not yet become mainstream technologies for treating dairy
manure. While many large farms digest small amounts of additional waste with dairy manure, few add
large (30%-40%) amounts of additional waste to dairy manure and as of 2005 only one farm had a twostage operation (U.S. EPA AgSTAR, 2005).
Modeling Anaerobic Digestion
History
Many anaerobic digestion models have been developed in the last 100 years. While use of farm
scale digesters remains limited, large scale implementation of digesters to treat municipal sewage and
sewage sludge began at the turn of the 20th century (Neave and Buswell, 1930). Since then mathematical
models relating input material and outputs, primarily gas production, have been created. Many rely on
simple correlations between intrinsic substrate properties such as volatile solids or COD content to predict
methane production. While having theoretical background, these one input correlations are often just as
limited in use and application as empirical models. Fair and Moore (1932) modeled gas production from
sewage solids as a function of time based on the volatile solids (VS) content of the solids, with the result:

Where G represents the amount of gas produced (or amount of digestible matter broken down), L
represents the total amount of digestible matter at the start of the digestion process (as measured by VS
content), Lt is the amount of gas remaining to be produced, and k1 and k2 are experimentally determined
5

constants (Fair and Moore, 1932). While this correlation allowed for the determination of gas production
as a function of time, it use was limited to the digestion of sewage solids and contained constants that
needed to be determined experimentally for each and every reaction condition. It also did not allow for
the estimation of gas production for the continuous digestion of substrate, only batch digestion. A similar,
purely empirical approach can be taken by fitting a curve to experimental rate of methane production
data, this being the most limiting case, being useful for only one set of experimental conditions, but still
elucidating differences between certain reaction conditions.
Buswell and Mueller created one of the first true models of the anaerobic digestion process,
predicting methane production based on reaction stoichiometry. Their investigations led to this
relationship:

with the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen content of the substrate being the model input parameters
(Buswell and Mueller, 1952). This gave an estimate on theoretical gas production from biomass of any
composition. But it does not allow for the calculation of a methane or gas production rate and therefore
cannot model a dynamic process.
Models with greater theoretical background have also been developed; using mathematical
microbial kinetics models. In 1949, Monod produced this model; a major advancement in understanding
bacterial/microbial kinetics:

In the above equation, R represents the growth rate of the bacteria, C represents the concentration of
nutrient or substrate fed to the bacteria. RK is the growth rate limit of a bacterium for a particular substrate
and C1 is the concentration of the substrate at which the growth rate is half of the maximum. This one
equation related the rate at which bacteria grew to the concentration of the substrate being consumed by
the bacteria. This model has been used and expanded to include pH, temperature, and inhibitory effects.
With such a model, dynamic bacteria growth can be modeled, and while still requiring some
experimentally determined factors, once found for a type of bacteria and substrate combination, the model
can be used for a wide variety of experimental conditions. Such a model without major modification is
still only applicable to a batch type growth of bacteria and not a continuous process, which is how most
anaerobic digesters operate (Gerber and Span, 2008).
ADM1
The Anaerobic Digester Model number 1, or ADM1, was created in 2002 by Batstone and the
International Water Associations (IWA) Task Group for Mathematical Modelling of Anaerobic
Digestion Processes (Batstone et al., 2002). The group aims for ADM1 to provide a unified basis for
anaerobic digestion modeling and for ADM1 to be a generic process model (Batstone et al., 2002).
ADM1 takes a substrate through five stages of digestion: disintegration, hydrolysis, acidogensis,
acetogenesis, and methanogenesis. The model performs all calculations on a basis of chemical oxygen
demand (COD) and contains 41 stoichiometric reaction parameters, 36 biochemical parameters, and 23
physiochemical parameters. The process is simulated within a continuously stirred tank reactor. The
6

substrate is first divided into four materials: carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and inert material, all on a
COD basis. This is the disintegration step. The next four steps are then carried out on these materials.
The model also includes the products from dead and decaying bacteria as substrate for other or future
bacteria.
ADM1 has already found quite widespread use. It can be modified to take input data about any
type of substrate, including olive mill waste (Boubaker and Ridha, 2008), grass silage (Wichern et al.,
2009), and dairy manure (Page et al., 2008). The model has also been implemented in a
MATLAB/SIMULINK environment by researchers from Lund University (Rosen and Jeppsson, 2006) to
be used in the Benchmark Simulation Model (BSM2) created by the IWA to model a complete sewage
wastewater treatment plant.
While ADM1 has been used to simulate the digestion of many different types of waste, the large
number of parameters needed to define that waste within the model has spurred much research into how
standard laboratory measurements can be used to estimate these complex parameters. Kleerebezem and
Van Loosdrecht (2006) presented a method of waste characterization using COD, total organic carbon
(TOC), organic nitrogen (NOrg) and alkalinity. A model, GISCOD, the General Integrated Solid Waste
Co-Digestion model is possibly the most advanced method of estimating the necessary inputs to ADM1.
It is a transformer model, implemented in MATLAB/Simulink, and would preface an ADM1 model.
The heart of the transformer applies a COD, charge balance, and elemental balance on carbon, hydrogen,
nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorous within the waste being degraded. It requires inputs of:

particulate COD
soluble COD (excluding volatile fatty acids)
volatile fatty acid content
total organic carbon
total organic nitrogen
total ammonia nitrogen
organic phosphorous
ortho-phosphate
total inorganic carbon
total alkalinity
fixed solids

This transformer can be applied to each and every waste stream entering the anaerobic digester model,
making this system a powerful tool when attempting to model co-digestion (Zaher et al., 2009).
DARIES
The Dynamic Anaerobic Reactor and Integrated Energy System (DARIES) model was developed
in 2010 under the work of Brouwer as a biogas and electricity production model of a dairy farm
anaerobic digester (Brouwer, 2010). The model incorporates ADM1 with a combined heat and power
model and a model of a digester heating system. In this way, a complete farm scale anaerobic digester
system can be modeled. DARIES is dynamic, takes in hourly weather data, and uses an expanded version
of ADM1 to allow it to also model a plug flow type reactor.
The model has been shown to accurately model biogas production and electricity production,
based on model predictions for 18 operating, farm scale anaerobic digestion systems (Brower, 2010). The
7

model outperforms and is more accurate than FarmWare, a model produced by the AgStar program.
DARIES is also one of only a few that simulates electricity and heat production in addition to biogas
production.
While DARIES is a major advancement in digester modeling, especially for farm scale digestion,
it has limitations. A limitation inherent to the ADM1 model within DARIES is the ability to only model a
continuously stirred tank reactor. DARIES has expanded this to also model a plug flow reactor, but if
other reactor types and configurations (two-phase systems) are to be used on dairy farms, models must be
created for these systems. Also, DARIES can model co-digestion, but in a very limited manner. Of the
inputs describing the feedstock to DARIES, two are the COD content of the waste and the
biodegradability of the waste. Using dairy manure as a primary substrate, co-digesting most other
materials with the manure will affect more parameters than just the COD content and biodegradability. In
its current implementation, increasing the COD content will simulate more concentrated dairy manure,
not a mixture of dairy manure with another type of waste. Also, biodegradability is a poorly defined
quality and while it has been successfully used as a parameter for describing manure digestion, it may be
limited in use to dairy manure.
Application
Mathematical models and their computer based implementation are of great importance.
Researchers have been mathematically modeling digestion processes, with some success and accuracy,
since the turn of the 20th century (Fair and Moore 1932). In industrial and municipal applications,
digestion models, such as ADM1, have seen use primarily in examining the control of digestion
processes. In this regard, the models can be used to evaluate control schemes and their responses to
various process disturbances (Seborg, 2011). Dynamic models can also be used to design and evaluate
complex control schemes and even for model predictive control, a type of advanced control logic that has
many benefits including providing early warnings of potential problems (Seborg, 2011). ADM1 and
DARIES implemented in MATLAB are well suited for use with a matrix type model predictive control
scheme.
DARIES and similar complete system models can also be utilized in process improvement and
design. Already operating digestion systems can be evaluated with a model, changes can be made to the
inputs of the model and the effect these changes have on the operating conditions of the process and
outputs can be evaluated. For example, with a model that accurately simulates co-digestion, a decision
can be made as to if it would be profitable to co-digest a waste with dairy manure on a farm, or if a
digestion plant is already co-digesting multiple wastes, the optimal ratio of these wastes can be found
without having to actually test these ratios in real-time. Accurate models can also be used to assist in
designing a new process. A variety of operating conditions can be evaluated long before construction ever
begins and the most profitable process design can be found. With a model that can simulate multi-stage
and complex reactor designs and configurations, different types of reactors can be evaluated.
While models such as ADM1 have seen use in evaluating process control schemes in wastewater
treatment plants, its use on farms seems to be limited. With an improved DARIES model, not only could
new, more cost effective and stable process control schemes be designed for farm scale digester systems,
but new reactor configurations such as multi-stage systems and new operating conditions such as codigesting multiple wastes could be evaluated for implementation on farm scale systems. This would
increase the use of dairy manure digestion systems, including the use of innovative new reactor designs
that have yet to see use on dairy farms in the United States.
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Methodology
There are two mains goals of this proposed research. The first is to expand DARIES to accurately
model the co-digestion of organic materials and wastes with dairy manure. The second is to expand
DARIES to model multi-stage digester systems; primarily temperature and kinetically phased digesters.
Task 1
To model the co-digestion of multiple wastes with dairy manure, previously developed models or
correlations that can be used to generate the necessary inputs for DARIES from laboratory collected data
about the waste will be implemented in DARIES. A great candidate has already been identified; the
General Integrated Solid Waste Co-Digestion model, or GISCOD (Zaher et al., 2009). This model is
implemented in Matlab/Simulink and was designed to work with ADM1, the digestion model in
DARIES. Therefore this model should be easily adaptable to DARIES.
This model, a sort of pre-processor for the substrates entering the digestion process, would be
placed in front of the ADM1 model that is within DARIES. GISCOD will first convert practical
measurement data such as chemical oxygen demand and total nitrogen content into the characteristics that
ADM1 needs to describe the substrate. This compositional information then enters a hydrolysis model.
This hydrolysis model operates in the same manner as the hydrolysis step that is carried out in ADM1. If
multiple substrates are to be co-digested, this operation is performed separately for each substrate. Then
the outputs of each of these hydrolysis models are combined into one set of inputs that are then sent to the
ADM1 model. In this way, the digestion of multiple waste streams can efficiently be modeled by ADM1.
The hydrolysis step is almost entirely removed from within ADM1, only the hydrolysis of the dead
bacterial population is still modeled within ADM1. Since GISCOD was designed for use with ADM1 in a
Matlab/Simulink environment it should be easily programmed in line with the ADM1 model within
DARIES.

Task 2
DARIES currently has the ability to model digestion in a completely mixed or plug flow type
reactor. ADM1 was originally designed to model a completely mixed reactor, so to model a plug flow
reactor in DARIES, four ADM1 mixed reactor models were placed in series. This approximates the
dynamics of a plug flow reactor, and a similar technique will be used to model multi-phase systems. To
model a temperature phased system, DARIES will be changed in such a way that would allow the user to
define the temperature of individual reactors placed in series. Also, a mechanism needs to be put in place
to change certain kinetic parameters based on the temperature of the reactor, particularly substrate
specific parameters. To model a bacterially phased system, the residences times of the reactors in series
must be able to be defined individually by the model user.
Task 3 Model Verification
To determine the accuracy of DARIES, simulations will be run based on pre-existing data sets
(Demirbas, 2006,Demirer and Chen, 2004,Kaparaju et al., 2009,Lehtomaki et al., 2007,Li et al., 2009
Zaher et al., 2009). Much research has been conducted in the past on the co-digestion of organic material
9

with dairy manure and the multi-stage digestion of dairy manure. These data sets would include dairy
manure co-digestion with food waste studies performed by Li et al., the co-digestion of energy crops with
dairy manure performed by Lehtomaki et al., the co-digestion of dairy manure with straw by Demirbas,
two-phase digestion of dairy manure by Demirer and Chen, the serial digestion of dairy manure by
Kaparaju et al., and many others focused on co-digestion of energy crops or food waste with dairy manure
and multi-phase digestion. The experimental conditions from previous experiments will be used as input
data for DARIES. This includes but is not limited to, data describing substrate fed to digesters, rate at
which mass or volume of substrate is added to digesters, the temperature of the digesters, and the
residence time of the digesters. The model will then be run with this input data and the results of the
simulation will be compared to the results of the co-digestion and/or multi-stage experiments. Gas
production rate, gas composition, volatile solids reduction, and pH will be compared between simulated
data and experimental data. This comparison will then be used to assess model accuracy using the same
procedure as used by Brouwer (Brouwer, 2010). The measured and predicted data sets will be taken as
functions of the measured data. It will then be determined if the regression lines of the model predictions
and the actual measured data are statistically coincident, with the regression of the measured data falling
on the line y=x. A least squares regression equation to include both measured and predicted data takes the
following form:
,
where the z term is a binary value; 1 if the data point came from the predicted group and a 0 if the data
point came from the measured data. This equation can then be simplified to two regression lines:

The hypothesis that 2= 3=0 will be used to test for coincidence of these two lines. A significance level
of =.05 will be used. Therefore, if the p-value calculated for an equation is less than =.05, the null
hypothesis is rejected and the model is deemed inaccurate. For a p-value greater than =.05, the model is
deemed accurate.
If a model is deemed inaccurate, parameters within the model may be adjusted such that the
model makes physical, theoretical sense. Model parameters within ADM1 in DARIES will not be
adjusted or fit to experimental data as this would greatly expand the scope of this project.
Preliminary Results
Work has already been conducted in editing the DARIES model so that it can model multi-phase
systems. A multi-phase system has been created in DARIES containing two completely mixed reactors in
series and the input to DARIES has been changed so that the user can adjust the residence time of each
reactor independently at the start of the simulation. It is has been noted that when the model is used to
simulate bacteria phased systems that have a first reactor utilizing a short residence time on the order of a
few days, the model runtime is significantly longer than any simulation run with a single stage system at a
typical residence time of 20-40 days. This must be improved, possibly by changing the solver used to
evaluate the many differential equations in the ADM1 model in DARIES.
Figure 1 below shows the two-phase reactor modeling Simulink block in DARIES. The darkened
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boxes labeled ADM1_DAE31 and ADM1_DAE32 are the ADM1 models that have been placed in series
so that a two-stage system can be modeled. The user can define the retention time of each reactor, so that
a kinetically (bacterially) phased system can be modeled.

Figure 1: Two-Phase Reactor Simulink Block in DARIES

Figure 2 below shows a plot of the pH versus time within the two reactors that make up this bacterially
phased system. It can be seen that the first reactor, which was simulated at a residence time of 10 days has
a lower pH than the second reactor which had a residence time of 20 days. This is one indication that this
model is indeed accurately simulating a bacterially phased system. The acid forming bacteria which grow
quickly have flourished in the first phase, lowering the pH, and the methanogenic bacteria consume those
acids in the second phase to produce methane and raise the pH. Dairy manure was being digested in this
simulation. Also, shortening the residence time of the first stage causes the pH of the first reactor to drop,
which is to be expected.

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Figure 2: Simulation Output: pH vs. Time. Phase 1- 10 Day HRT, Phase 2- 20 Day HRT

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Timeline
March 2011-June 2011

Finish and improve multi-stage implementation in DARIES

Evaluate accuracy and run-time
Write thesis while performing experiments and working with DARIES

June 2011-September 2011

Implement GISCOD into DARIES

Identify any methods or correlations that could be utilized to describe food waste input
into GISCOD with a minimal number of laboratory tests
Begin to evaluate accuracy
Identify any run-time issues

August 2011-December 2011

Evaluate accuracy of complete model

Perform any necessary laboratory scale experiments if any data sets are needed that
cannot be found in literature
Complete thesis

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