Performance of anaerobic reactor with media support and Ni addition for palm oil mill effluent treatment

An advanced anaerobic reactor was utilized to treat palm oil mill effluent (POME). The aim of this study was to investigate the performance of tubular anaerobic reactor with media support (bio-ball) and trace metal (Ni) addition in organics removal and biogas production. The reactor volume is quite large of 40 liters to ensure the applicability of this reactor to solve the industrial problem. The reactor has been run in two mode of batch and continuous. The COD removal for batch operating mode was 88.75% by using 36 days of treatment. While for continuous mode the COD removal can reach up to 95% for high concentration of influent by retention time (HRT) of 20 day. High methane gas concentration can be obtained at 65.131 % for reactor with support media and Ni-ion added in countinous mode operation.