Biogas plants need easy and practical tools for monitoring and evaluating their biological process efficiency. As soon as, in many cases, biomass supply present considerable costs, full-scale anaerobic digestion (AD) processes must approach, as much as possible, the potential biogas yield of the organic mixture fed to the biodigesters. In this paper, a new indicator is proposed (the bio-methane yield, BMY), for measuring the efficiency in full-scale AD processes, based on a balance between the biochemical methane potential (BMP) of the input biomass and the residual BMP of the output materials (digestate). For this purpose, a one-year survey was performed on three different full-scale biogas plants, in the Italian agro-industrial context, and the bio-chemical processes were fully described in order to calculate their efficiencies (BMY = 87-93%) and to validate the new indicator proposed, as useful and easily applicable tool for full-scale AD plants operators.
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