Response surface methodology (RSM) based on a Box-Behnken Design (BBD) was applied to optimize the thermal-alkaline pre-treatment operating conditions for anaerobic digestion of flotation scum in food waste leachate. Three independent variables such as thermal temperature, NaOH concentration and reaction time were evaluated. The maximum methane production of 369.2 mL CH4/g VS was estimated under the optimum conditions at 62.0°C, 10.1% NaOH and 35.4 min reaction time. A confirmation test of the predicted optimum conditions verified the validity of the BBD with RSM. The analysis of variance indicated that methane production was more sensitive to both NaOH concentration and thermal temperature than reaction time. Thermal-alkaline pretreatment enhanced the improvement of 40% in methane production compared to the control experiment due to the effective hydrolysis and/or solubilization of organic matters. The fractions with molecular weight cut-off of scum in food waste leachate were conducted before and after pre-treatment to estimate the behaviors of organic matters. The experiment results found that thermal-alkaline pre-treatment could reduce the organic matters more than 10kD with increase the organic matters less than 1kD.

In this study, the effect of different reaction times for thermal-alkaline pretreatment on the solubilization and biogasification of polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) were evaluated. Thermal-alkaline pretreatment tests were performed at 73 °C and pH 13 at 0-120 h reaction times. The mesophilic anaerobic batch tests were performed with untreated and pretreated PHB samples. The increase in the pretreatment reaction time results in a 52.8-98.8% increase of the abiotic solubilization efficiency of the PHB samples. The reaction time required to achieve solubilization efficiencies of 50%, 90%, and 95% were 10.5, 52.0, and 89.6 h, respectively. The biogasification of the untreated PHB samples achieved a specific methane production rate of 3.6 mL CH4/g VSS/d and require 101.3 d for complete biogasification. The thermal-alkaline pretreatment significantly improved specific methane production rate (10.2-16.0 time increase), lag time (shortened by 76-81%), and time for complete biogasification (shortened by 21-83%) for the biogasification of the PHB samples when compared to those of the untreated PHB samples. The improvement was higher as the reaction time of the thermal-alkaline pretreatment increased. The findings of this study could be used as a valuable reference for the optimization of the biogasification process in the treatment of PHB wastes.