Roles of micro-aeration on enhancing volatile fatty acids and lactic acid production from agricultural wastes

Abstract

Micro-aeration was proven to be an environmentally friendly strategy for efficiently enhancing volatile fatty acids (VFAs) and lactic acid (LA) production. The roles of micro-aeration on mono-digestion of swine manure (SM) for VFAs production and co-digestion of SM with corn silage (CS) for LA production were investigated, respectively. In this study, micro-aeration increased the maximum VFAs concentration by 20.3% to 35.71 g COD/L, and shortened the time to reach the maximum from 18 days to 10 days. Micro-aeration limited the conversion of LA into VFAs, leading to LA accumulation effectively to be 26.08 g COD/L. Microbial community analysis suggested that Clostridium and Terrisporobacter were always the dominant bacteria with or without micro-aeration for VFAs production, but the relative abundance increased notably during the same period. However, Bifidobacterium, which could use the higher productivity metabolism pathway, i.e., Bifidum pathway to produce LA, increased from lower than 1% to 22.9% by micro-aeration.

Keywords: Lactic acid; Micro-aeration; Microbial Communities; Volatile fatty acids.