Influence of hydraulic retention time on the psychrophilic hydrolysis/acidogenesis of proteins

The influence of the hydraulic retention time (HRT) on the anaerobic hydrolysis of complex substrates has been studied under psychrophilic conditions. For this purpose, a continuous stirred tank reactor was operated at 15 °C and neutral pH and gelatin was considered as a model protein. Three HRTs have been tested: 12, 21 and 36 h. Gelatin hydrolysis was greatly dependent on HRT, increasing from 40% at 12 h-HRT to a maximum of 65% at 36 h-HRT. Molecular size distribution analyses of the effluent showed that hydrolysation of compounds larger than 10 kDa was poor at 12 h-HRT, whereas the fraction of 1–10 kDa was completely transformed into compounds smaller than 1 kDa. Higher HRT (36 h) improved the degradation of the recalcitrant fraction (>10 kDa), obtaining an effluent with around 95% of soluble molecules (<1 kDa). In that way, the use of membrane bioreactors for the treatment of this type of macromolecules could improve the degradation efficiencies by enabling to increase the residence time of the non-hydrolyzed molecules, with what would be possible to achieve higher organic loading rate operation.