Advances in Anaerobic Digestion of Agricultural and Industrial Organic Waste: 2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Anaerobic digestion (AD) represents a suitable technology for the transformation of organic waste to valuable renewable energy. However, the feeding of complex organic matrices to conventional digesters could lead to low conversion performance. Therefore, adequate methodologies are necessary to overcome the digestion difficulty of some agricultural and industrial wastes. In this regard, scientific research in recent years has taken different directions. The main approaches for the enhancement of anaerobic digestion processes can be summarized as follows: optimization of the process parameters, co-digestion, feedstock pretreatment, additive supplementation, optimization of bioreactor configurations, and application of genetic technologies. The first strategy aims to identify the optimal values of parameters that mainly affect the AD process to increase biogas production (pH, temperature, COD/N/P ratio, organic loading rate, etc.). In co-digestion processes, two or more different wastes are fed into the digesters in proper amounts to obtain a balanced mixture in terms of chemical–physical characteristics. On the other hand, the use of pretreatments exploits physical and chemical processes to improve the characteristics of waste before feeding it into digesters. The supplementation of additives (activated carbon, zero-valent metals, zeolites, etc.) aims to enhance AD mechanisms including direct interspecies electron transfer (DIET). Bioreactor optimization focuses on changing digesters’ geometry from single-stage to double-stage and multi-stage to improve the digestion of complex organic waste. Genetic strategies exploit the manipulations of enzymes, methanogens, and microbial strains to enhance biological activity.

This Special Issue welcomes papers focused on the latest knowledge and innovations in processes aimed at biogas production from agricultural and industrial organic wastes. The papers must show originality and provide a significant contribution to the scope of the Special Issue.

Thank you for your contributions.

Dr. Alessio Siciliano
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Fermentation is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• anaerobic digestion
• anaerobic bioreactors
• biogas
• biomethane
• co-digestion
• fermentation
• methanization
• organic waste
• organic waste pretreatment

• Advances in Anaerobic Digestion of Agricultural and Industrial Organic Waste in Fermentation (10 articles)