The configuration of the reactor influences the digestion process and thus the product yields; other factors such as the rate of biogas production or biogas loss also affect the process specifically with high solid configuration. With these in mind, the ORganic WAste REsearch (ORWARE) anaerobic digestion sub-model was modified to be able to study solid-state anaerobic digestion (SS-AD) (using plug-flow reactor). The simulation results from the updated model agreed with the operational data with respect to methane yield, digestate yield and energy turnover. The model was found to be sensitive to changes in feedstock composition but to a lesser extent to changes in process temperature and retention time. By applying the model on several cases of liquid anaerobic digestion (L-AD), it was noticed that L-AD at mesophilic condition with 25 retention days seemed to be superior to other cases of L-AD with regard to energy turnover. However, even if similar methane production were observed for L-AD and SS-AD, the model suggested higher energy turnover for the case of SS-AD at thermophilic condition, being 10% more in average in comparison with cases of L-AD.

In developing countries like Turkey, food waste has the highest share compared to other municipal solid waste components. A detailed life cycle assessment has been performed to evaluate different food waste management options (i.e., landfilling, anaerobic digestion, thermal treatment, co-treatment with municipal wastewater) for Istanbul which is the largest city of Turkey and Europe. The current waste management has the worst environmental performance compared to proposed waste management scenarios as follows: Anaerobic digestion, thermal treatment and co-treatment with municipal wastewater. The thermal treatment scenario has been found to have the best environmental performance in most of the impact categories including climate change. The anaerobic digestion scenario ranks in the first place only in freshwater eutrophication, which is attributed to avoided fertilizer use in this scenario. A drastic improvement with 866% has been found in this category if the anaerobic digestion scenario was followed. Co-treatment with municipal wastewater refers to use of food waste disposers at households and provides improvements especially in marine eutrophication and ecotoxicity. Lower effluent emissions by means of biological wastewater treatment in the co-treatment scenario compared to other proposed scenarios lead to better performance in these categories. Various sub-scenarios have also been investigated such as using biogas as vehicle fuel, replacing a combined heat and power with a condensing plant and increasing food waste addition to sewer lines. Important improvements are not achievable in the first two sub-scenarios; however, increasing food waste addition to sewer lines reduces various environmental impact categories by −41% and −60%. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

Solid-state anaerobic digestion (SS-AD) takes place when solid content of the substrate is higher than 15%. Some advantages of this technology have been recognized as e.g., less required water added to raw feedstock and consequently minimized digester size and cost, higher volumetric organic loading rates (OLR) that may lead to higher efficiency methane yield and better acceptance of a wide range of feedstocks. However, scientific studies of SS-AD at pilot- and full-scale are very few and difficulties have been reported in operating SS-AD, especially when the system undergoes a scale-up, where methane production is the purpose. As a result, this review gives a summary of scientific studies for SS-AD processes at laboratory-, pilot- and full-scale, where a great diversity of substrate composition, reactor design and operational parameters have been categorized, and their performances in terms of methane yield have been analyzed. This, in turn, helps to identify that factors affecting methane yields at different scales arise mainly from operational conditions as well as the characteristic of feedstocks. This review even contributes to suggest several strategies for improvement of methane yield at full-scale.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a beneficial tool to evaluate the performance of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) and to compare different upgrading options. The main objective of this study is to investigate the environmental impact of upgrading options of a preliminary WWTP in Istanbul, Turkey. The preliminary plant currently consists of mechanical treatment units and various upgrading options including primary treatment and high-rate activated sludge system (HRAS) process as well as the addition of food waste to wastewater were compared. Results showed that the baseline scenario (S0) had worse performance than all future scenarios (S1-3) except for climate change. The scenario of adding food waste to wastewater (S3) has the best performance in climate change, terrestrial acidification, terrestrial ecotoxicity and fossil depletion. Increased addition of food waste was also tested in the sensitivity analysis, and major improvements were obtained especially in climate change and terrestrial ecotoxicity.

By using a so-called differential-integral method on the chemical potential of a hard-sphere fluid, a special variant of our previously developed expression that describes the interaction between charged plates immersed in an electrolyte, is introduced to examine the hard-sphere fluid mediated pressure in a slit. The resulting expression consists of a kinetic contribution and a hard-sphere contribution, and it is formulated as a function of the single-particle direct correlation function and the density distribution of a hard-sphere fluid. It allows us to conveniently apply the classic density functional theory to explicitly investigate the influence of the hard-sphere excluded-volume effect on the interaction pressure between surfaces. In this study, a newly proposed weighted correlation approach (WCA)-Denton and Ashcroft (DA) method is employed to predict the interaction pressure as well as its pressure components for a hard-sphere fluid inside a slit pore. Comparisons with the results from the Monte Carlo simulations and the fundamental measure theory suggest that the WCA-DA method is able to accurately capture the detailed characteristic pattern of the pressure-separation curves at different fluid densities. It is also found, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that the hard-sphere pressure contribution dominates over the kinetic pressure contribution in determining the oscillatory behaviour of the interaction pressure curves, especially when a hard-sphere fluid of high density is concerned.

This doctoral thesis presents a newly developed density functional theory (DFT), i.e., the weighted correlation approach (WCA), to study the structural and thermodynamic properties of an inhomogeneous fluid at an interface. The WCA approach provides a generic formulation to evaluate the change of the single-particle direct correlation function in terms of a series of pair direct correlation functions weighted by different correlation-weight functions with adjustable correlation-weight factors. When applied practically, however, an approximation of the pair direct correlation function has to be made, together with appropriate definitions of the weighted densities and the choices of the correlation-weight functions. Despite this seeming complexity, it is shown that the WCA approach can be regarded as a generalization of the classic density functional approaches and this enables us to develop and apply DFT methods in different ways. For demonstration purposes, several implementations of the WCA approach are proposed and applied to predict the density distribution of an inhomogeneous fluid at an interface. The WCA approach is also employed with a novel pressure expression to investigate the inhomogeneous fluid-mediated interaction pressure for different cases. The WCA calculations from the above applications suggest that it is a successful approach for describing the structural and thermodynamic properties of an inhomogeneous fluid at an interface, as compared to the published results of the Monte Carlo simulations, density functional methods and experimental data.

The combination of the fundamental measure theory (FMT) and the weighted correlation approach (WCA) within the framework of the density functional theory, i.e., the FMT/ WCA approach, is applied to study the swelling pressure of Nabentonite at different salt conditions. Good agreement between the FMT/WCA simulations and the results from both experiments and a Donnan-equilibrium-based DLVO model suggests that the hydration repulsion between charged surfaces can be well accounted by the ionion correlations effect.

The purpose of this study is to extend the weighted correlation approach (WCA) for inhomogeneous fluids. It now introduces a generic expression to evaluate the single-particle direct correlation function in terms of a series of pair direct correlation functions weighted by different correlation-weight functions and adjustable weight factors. When applied for practical use, however, approximations of the pair direct correlation functions have to be made, together with appropriate definitions of the weighted densities and the choices of the correlation-weight functions. The WCA approach would, then, not only help us to connect and compare different strategies and their underlying assumptions in the density functional approaches, but also enable us to propose and apply density functional theory methods to predict the density profile of, e. g., the hard-sphere fluid confined between a pair of parallel planar hard walls. Numerical results of the extended WCA approach, against the Monte Carlo (MC) simulations in a range of surface separations and bulk densities, suggest that it is capable of representing the fine features of the hard-sphere density distributions. The WCA results also agree well with the calculations from the fundamental measure theory. In addition, the thermodynamic self-consistency of the WCA approach is confirmed by its fairly good agreement with the MC fitted data for the surface tension of a hard-sphere fluid at a planar hard wall. All these tests show that a pure WCA approach can be constructed to investigate the states of ionic hard-sphere fluids.

Based on the Euler-Lagrange equation for ion density distribution in an inhomogeneous, charged, and hard-sphere fluid, a novel method is proposed to determine the interaction pressure between charged plates. The resulting expression is a sum of distinct physical contributions to the pressure, which involves different contributions to the single-particle direct correlation function. It can, therefore, be conveniently used in any density functional approach to facilitate analysis of the pressure components. In this study, the so-called fundamental measure theory (FMT)/weighted correlation approach (WCA) approach is applied to estimate both the hard-sphere and the electric residual contributions to the single-particle direct correlation function, upon the calculation of the ionic density profiles between charged plates. The results, against the Monte Carlo simulations, show that the FMT/WCA approach is superior to the typical FMT/mean spherical approximation approach of the density functional theory in predicting the interaction pressure between charged plates immersed in an electrolyte solution upon various conditions in the primitive model. The FMT/WCA approach can well capture the fine features of the pressure-separation dependence, to reproduce not only the shoulder shape and the weak attractions in monovalent electrolytes but also the strongly oscillatory behavior of pressure in divalent electrolytes where pronounced attractions are observed. In addition, it is found that the FMT/WCA approach even has an advantage over the anisotropic, hyper-netted chain approach in that it agrees with the Monte Carlo results to a very good extent with, however, much less computational effort.

Within the framework of density functional theory, a weighted correlation approach is developed in order to obtain the density distributions of an inhomogeneous fluid. It results in a formally exact expression, by means of the concept of a weighted pair correlation function, used to evaluate the change of the single-particle direct correlation function of the system relative to that of a reference state. When applying the approach for practical use, however, an approximation of the pair correlation function has to be made, along with an appropriate definition of a weight function. Noticeably, combining this approach with fundamental measure theory gives rise to a new method, which we call the FMT/WCA-k(2) approach, for studying the structural and thermodynamic properties of a charged hard-sphere fluid subjected to a spatially varying external potential. Application of the FMT/WCA-k(2) approach in a range of electrolyte concentrations and surface charge densities, against the Monte Carlo simulations, shows that it is superior to the typical approaches of density functional theory in predicting the ionic density profiles of both counter-ions and co-ions near a highly charged surface. It is capable of capturing the fine features of the structural properties of the electric double layers, to well reproduce the layering effect and the charge inversion phenomenon, also in strongly coupled cases where divalent counter-ions are involved. In addition, it is found that the FMT/WCA-k(2) approach even has an advantage over the anisotropic, hyper-netted chain approaches in giving better agreement with the Monte Carlo results.