Utilisation of textile waste for enhanced biogas production (Ref: ABCE-SECC-TR)

Large amounts of textile waste are generated worldwide during their manufacture and as post-consumer waste. Textile recycling is difficult as a variety of fabric materials are used in production, and most of it ends up in landfills or get incinerated. Anaerobic digestion (AD) is an environment-friendly microbial process that can degrade organic materials and produces biogas. Cotton represents the largest fraction of textile waste that can be subjected to AD. However, its high crystallinity resists microbial degradation. An effective pretreatment is required before using cotton-rich textiles as AD feed, to aid the breakdown of organic matter and increase biogas yield. Most pretreatment techniques are often energy-intensive, expensive and produce toxic residues that can adversely affect sensitive AD microbial communities. The main aim of this PhD project is to study textile pretreatment process using highly reactive species produced by gas plasma and how the AD microbial system is affected by the pretreated materials (mostly experimental but may involve computational simulations). An energy-efficient and scalable plasmamicrobubble pretreatment reactor that has been developed over the past few years will be used for this purpose.