A dispersion based model for anaerobic digestion of solid cattle wastes in a stratified thermophilic accumulation system

A dynamic model has been developed to describe the anaerobic digestion of solid cattle waste in an accumulation system (AC). To calibrate the model an experiment was carried out at a lab-scale AC at 50 °C. The predicted methane production shows a very good agreement (i.e. R²=0.998) with the experimental data. However less agreement is evident for the intermediates. After model validation the model was applied to study the effect of different aspect ratios on the system performance. An optimum aspect ratio of 2–3 could be determined.