Comparison of anaerobic digestion characteristics and kinetics of four livestock manures with different substrate concentrations

• This work compared the AD characteristics of four livestock manures.
• Negative correlations were found between initial manure substrate concentrations and CMY.
• Percentages of methane in final biogas volume decreased when loading rate increased from 8 g VS/L to 64 g VS/L.
• Cone model fitted the experiment data better than first order model and transfer function model.

Anaerobic digestions of pig manure (PM), dairy manure (DM), chicken manure (CM) and rabbit manure (RM) at initial volatile solid loading (VSL) of 8 g VS/L, 16 g VS/L, 32 g VS/L, 64 g VS/L were investigated under mesophilic conditions. The maximum methane yields of 410, 270, 377 and 323 mL CH4/g VSadded for PM, DM, CM and RM were all obtained at initial VSL of 8 g VS/L, respectively. The improvement of substrate concentration to 64 g VS/L not only decreased the methane yield and biodegradability both by 22.4%, 37.3%, 49.1% and 34.6% for PM, DM, CM and RM respectively, but also reduced the methane content in final biogas production. The Cone model (R2: 0.9910–0.9974) showed a better fit to the experiment data and the calculated parameters indicated that anaerobic digestion of manures at higher loading has longer lag phase and lower hydrolysis rate.