A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineeringin Environmental Engineering and Management

Thesis (M. Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2018

In present, the energy consumption has been increased in every year. Fossil Fuel is the most resource which is used for energy generation such as coal, oil, and natural gas. Nevertheless, there is the limited energy utilization. Then, the renewable energy is more required to use as fossil fuel. Anaerobic process can produce biogas that is the one type of renewable energy from biomass.Press-mud is waste from sugar production process. It contains organic matter that can be used as raw material for feeding anaerobic process. Also, the lignocellulose and protein are the main composition in press-mud that are the hardly microbe degradation molecule. Therefore, the pretreatment is required before using press-mud in anaerobic system. LDD.1 and LDD.2 is the fungi group which are used for biological pretreatment. Press-mud was pretreated by LDD.1 for lignocellulose degradation, after that, LDD.2 was used for protein degradation. Press-mud with pretreatment both LDD.1 and LDD.2 was fed in anaerobic process. The twosingle stage semi-continuously stirredreactors were studied. The first is control reactor which raw press-mud was useas feedstock. Another one is pretreatment reactor that was fed by press-mud with both LDD.1 and LDD.2 pretreatment. The organic loading rate was operated at 2, 4, and 6 kgVS/m3-d. The biogas production, methane yield and COD removal were observed for performance comparison in both reactor. The highest biogas production and methane yield was observed at 6 kgVS/m3-d of organic loading rate in pretreatment reactor. The amount of highest biogas yield was 0.172 m3/kgVS that the percentage of methane compositionwas 62.22% and highest methane yield was 0.107 m3CH4/kgVS. Also, the highest COD removal was 89.9 % that was achieved in at organic loading rate 6 kgVS/m3-d.