Modeling and Design of a Food Waste to Energy System for an Urban Building

Book excerpt: Urban sustainability is a subject of recent focus in North America, and Canada specifically. As our urban areas continue to grow and consume large quantities of energy and produce massive amounts of waste, we are faced with the challenge of how to manage this situation in a way which is both responsible and sustainable. One feasible urban waste-to-energy technology is anaerobic digestion. Anaerobic digestion (AD) has been a usable energy source for over 100 years and is currently being employed in countries around the world in rural settings to generate electricity and heat, but it has yet to make a large migration to the urban environment though it is a viable and mature process. Applied to the organic waste produced in urban environments, anaerobic digestion could provide a critical solution to growing garbage problems while simultaneously reducing external energy requirements. The cost of transporting waste outside of cities to landfills will continue to rise and if a substantial portion of this waste could be retained, digested, reduced, and converted into useable energy in the urban environment, then this is something to be seriously considered. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the feasibility of power and energy generation through the use of anaerobic digestion of food waste in the urban environment, suggest a novel modeling technique using the International Water Association's Anaerobic Digestion Model #1, and provide a case study from the downtown campus of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.