BIOHYDROGEN PRODUCTION BY DARK FERMENTATION: FROM LABORATORY TO FULL SCALE.

Hydrogen is a promising, eco-friendly fuel for the future, especially when obtained from renewable sources such as anaerobic digestion (AD). After proving that biomass'composition is involved in the production of hydrogen, a comparison between single- and two-stage AD showed that the latter is not less convenient than the classical, single stage process. The addition of a further stage (microbial fuel cells) to AD reactors showed an interesting perspective for two-stage AD, which resulted in better total energy yields when compared to single-stage process. The process is feisable on full scale, but technical issues are to be solved in order to obtain better performances.