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Design and Construction of a Water Scrubber for the Upgrading of Biogas

Temilola T Olugasa and Oluwafemi A Oyesile

This paper discusses the results of studies conducted on raw biogas produced from a prototypic biogas production plant located at the Teaching and Research Farm, University of Ibadan, Ibadan. This setup consists of a mixing chamber, a biogas digester and a stabilizing unit, locally designed and fabricated. It further discusses preliminary and detailed design coupled with the construction of an effective and efficient technology used in purifying raw biogas generated from the prototypic biogas production plant; this technology is otherwise known as the Water Scrubbing technology. The Scrubbing system consists of the Water scrubber with iron wool packed bed connected to a 500 litre water tank, and two tyre tubes which were used in storing the pre scrubbed (raw) biogas and the scrubbed (purified) biogas. The water scrubber has an inlet for the entry of the raw biogas and a discharge for the exit of the scrubbed biogas. Raw biogas from the plant was stored in a tyre tube and directly fed into the Water scrubber housing the iron wool packed bed, the purified biogas from the exit was also collected into another tyre tube. The samples of the gas mixture were taken before and after scrubbing and analyzed with Pascal Manometric Glass Tube technique. Results indicated that methane content of the scrubbed/ purified biogas was raised from 58% to 82% due to the reduction of Carbon dioxide and Hydrogen Sulphide. CO₂ was reduced from 31% to 14% while H₂S was reduced from 1% to 0.4%.

The corresponding Energy content of the purified biogas was evaluated to be 41MJ/kg which is higher than that of the raw biogas which was evaluated to be 29MJ/kg.