A microcontroller-based household anaerobic food digester

During the last decade, the amount of food waste worldwide has been increasing at an alarming rate. The high decomposition potential of food waste has fostered its recycling into valuable end-products instead of adding to the already convoluted landfilling problem. In this paper, a two-stage anaerobic digester is developed to manage food waste at a household level. The outputs of the digester, namely biogas and compost, can be used domestically as fuel for cooking and bio-fertilizer respectively. Sensors are used in the digester to monitor the temperature and pH of the main anaerobic digestion processes occurring in the second stage of the digester. In addition, a safe heating mechanism is implemented in that stage to maintain the temperature of the organic material within the thermophilic range. A microcontroller processes all the signals received from the sensors to optimally control the anaerobic digestion. Results show that the proposed model improves the processing time significantly as compared to conventional models.