Pilot scale (1 m^3) anaerobic fermenter

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The Center for Energy Technology (ZET) of the University of Bayreuth combines the complementary competencies and activities in energy related research of currently nine chairs of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences. Aspects of thermal, electrical, chemical, but also biological generation, transmission, storage and utilization of energy are researched at the ZET, albeit originally distributed over the individual chairs. In 2018, it became possible to relocate and combine these activities on campus, in the new building of the Technology Alliance of Upper Franconia (TAO).Within ZET, the Chair for Bioprocess Engineering (LBPT, Prof. Dr. Ruth Freitag) in particular focusses on biological aspects of regenerative energy technology. Research centers on microbiological and engineering aspects of technical facilities in the area of environmental engineering, such as biological waste digestion plants (biogas production), composting plants, or waste water treatment plants. Important research questions currently concern process variants allowing for flexibilization of the microbial conversion, as well as aspects of scale up / scale down of the plants. Effects of certain impurities such as microplastic, metal(oid)s, or nitrogen compounds, but also problems of technology transfer constitute additional research priorities.Technical facilities in waste management usually require reactor volumes of several 1000 m3. Concomitantly, these plants have to continuously ensure important municipal services (waste disposal, wastewater treatment). Therefore, their availability for scientific experiments is limited. The question of how to provide data with predictive value for the technical plants in laboratory or pilot plant scale experiments has been discussed at length in our group. Currently research at the LBPT is limited to reactor with a size below 100 L. The bridge to the technical facilities is made via so-called satellite experiments. However, these are inherently limited and cannot provide the necessary information. Instead an anaerobic pilot plant, which is much closer in size to the technical plants (low m3-range) is required, as only such a reactor would be large enough to establish the full biological diversity of a technical plant.The reason for this current limitation in research is historical. When the chair was founded in 2003, there was no hall space available for the set-up of a large pilot plant. This has now changed with the new TAO building, where sufficient space is available to accommodate the requested anaerobic pilot plant, which would close a substantial gap in our scientific capabilities. The requested pilot plant is designed for research purposes. In particular, it can be flexibly operated and linked to a number of peripheral modules. As a result, modules from other groups of the ZET or from TAO can be integrated and evaluated, e.g. from the fields of energy storage, heat utilization, or power-to-gas.