The Biochemical Methane Potential (BMP) test is an essential tool to derive practical knowledge for optimizing and operating full-scale anaerobic digesters, monitoring, modelling, and evaluating process performances, or when a scenario analysis is being developed. Despite its usefulness is undoubted, long duration of BMP tests is problematic for many of its applications, especially when prompt results to take decisions are required. Over the last decades, several scientific contributions demonstrated that a reduction of BMP test duration is possible by predicting the final gas production. The purpose of this thesis work is the development of a new procedure/algorithm to obtain a preliminary estimation of the experimental BMP result by using a linear fractional transformation (LFT) formulation of the original nonlinear model for the identification of its parameters. The efficacy and the efficiency of the algorithm developed will be verified using experimental data of BMP tests performed on different substrates commonly fed to anaerobic digesters.

Reference teachers: Prof. Gianni Ferretti and Arianna Catenacci – gianni.ferretti@polimi.it – arianna.catenacci@polimi.it