A novel application of red mud-iron on granulation and treatment of palm oil mill effluent using upflow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor.

The performance of the upflow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor that used red mud-iron (RM-Fe) for methane production for the treatment of palm oil mill effluent (POME) at various hydraulic retention time (HRT) was determined. POME was used as the substrate carbon source. The biogas production rate was 1.7 l biogas/h with a methane yield of 0.78 l CH4/g CODremoved and chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal was 85% at POME concentration of 30 g COD/l at HRT 16 h. The reactor R2 showed average methane content of biogas and COD reduction of 78% and 85% at 400 mg/l RM-Fe. Significant increase in the granule diameter (up to 2900 µm) in R2 was compared to control R1 (up to 86 µm) at end of the experiment.