Sylvia Murunga, PhD. Studied Environmental and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. Lecturer at JKUAT, Nairobi, Kenya.

The production of biogas from renewable resources is becoming a prominent feature of most developed and developing countries of the world. It is produced when varieties of diverse microbes degrade biological materials in the absence of oxygen. The composition of this microbial consortium depends on various environmental and internal factors. The coexistence of different microbial populations as a result of change in the reactor operational conditions provides unprecedented control over their overall contribution to the degradation of the organic matter. The low growth rates and the susceptibility of the organisms to toxins enhances the difficulties in the optimization of methanogenesis. The study builds on the analysis of the biodegradability index of the brewery wastewater and primary microbial growth models developed by Benjamin Gomperzt in 1938 and Logistic by Pierre-François Verhulst in 1838, to describe the growth of the methanogenic community in a bio-digester as a function of time, and to determine their growth parameters, hence maximum utilization of the exponential phase of the microbial growth for production of biogas.