Liquid purification or separation – Processes – Treatment by living organism
Patent
1998-08-21
2000-05-09
Simmons, David A.
Liquid purification or separation
Processes
Treatment by living organism
210610, 210613, 210149, 210173, 210181, 210256, 48197A, C02F 328
Patent
active
060599723
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The invention relates to an apparatus for receiving and conditioning organic waste that operates by anaerobic bioconversion, as well as a process for treating a flux of organic waste in this apparatus. The principal application of the invention is the treatment of waste produced by restaurant kitchens and other facilities, but other applications are also possible.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The reduction and elimination of, or the recovery of energy from, organic waste from urban activities is a problem that can be approached from several angles, the studies resulting therefrom leading to varying solutions according to the importance attached to the different parameters under consideration.
Formerly, food waste was sold to serve as animal feed. Today, this traditional mode of recycling food waste has given way to a policy of destruction, which is much more expensive. In parallel, there is a growing tendency to increase the intermediate stockage time for waste food, in order to allow more time between collection operations whose cost is also ever increasing.
The solutions imagined to date to combat the risks associated with food waste waiting for collection are refrigeration or partial sterilization using chemical products; both involve the temporary and costly slowing of an uncontrolled biological activity.
In contrast to procedures in use heretofore, the present invention provides for a local and immediate treatment of organic matter to carry out controlled biological processes in a specially designed digestor.
The present invention principally takes into account the mass of kitchen waste to be managed by restaurants serving a large number of meals. The invention is derived from two considerations:
On the one hand, making available to these facilities an anerobic digestor that, while being as compact as possible is able to receive the mass of waste and continually restitute therefrom waste waters, concentrated solid residues and biogas of high-quality (from the point of view of good calorific value and combustibility), responds to a real need.
On the other hand, water purification stations, composting apparatus or other installations of the same type operate conventionally based on the principle that fluxes of organic waste are collected on as large a scale as possible and delivered to a center where the bioconversion process takes place in relatively stable conditions.
Stability is indeed an essential condition for maintaining the biological process for transforming the materials.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Taking into account the flux of kitchen waste produced in restaurants or other facilities of the same type, the present invention departs from the principle set out above. It aims to install "digestors" at the very sites where the waste is produced and proposes a treatment system which, by carefully acting on the digestor's dynamics, enables the bioconversion process to be sustained, despite any temporary quantitative or qualitative variations or irregularities in the flow of waste to be treated.
In this manner, the food waste will be treated before it has enough time to develop any pathogenic activity. Thanks to the action of micro-organisms and the methanogenetic process, its potential energy will be converted to a valuable product, biogas.
The principal idea of the invention is to create an apparatus for the treatment of organic waste that can be operated precisely and at will, so that the treatment process takes place as efficiently as possible, despite variations in the flux of waste to be treated.
To this end, the first object of the invention is an apparatus according to claim 1, and its second object a process according to claim 14. Further characteristics of the invention are set out in the dependent claims.
The tank according to the invention comprises a main enclosure where bioconversion takes place, and a secondary enclosure for receiving and storing organic waste before it is transferred to the main enclosure to complete bioconversion.
As the organic waste is
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Prince Fred
Simmons David A.
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