Abstract:
Thailand is an agricultural country growing various amount of plants and doing
numerous husbandry especially chicken farming with highest volume, However, its
impacts are undesirable odors and using chicken droppings to produce biogas with
water hyacinth could help to mitigate such problem. Additionally, biogas is obtained
to replace cooking gas. Therefore, the researcher is interested in examining possibility
of producing biogas from chickens and water hyacinth. This study aims to investigate
possibility of producing biogas from chicken droppings and water hyacinth to find
heat required for boiling water and analyzing economic worthiness of producing
biogas. This research is divided into 2 parts including part 1: biogas production from
chicken droppings and water hyacinth with research term of 50 days. The findings
reveal that ratio of water hyacinth: 10% (w/v) chicken droppings at 20:100 is most
effective in terms of quantity and biogas generation time with cumulative biogas of
5,648 milliliter. The second part was to find heating value of water boiling and the
result showed that at ratio of water hyacinth: 10% (w/v) chicken droppings of 20:100,
the highest heating value was 21,031.74 megajoule/kilogram. After analyzing economic
worthiness, the researcher found that breakeven time was 1 year. Net present value
was 5,275.74 baht and internal rate of return was 66.1296 higher than discount rate of
10%. Therefore, biogas production is attractive investment. For the sensitivity anaylsis,
it was found that in the cases of cost increasing at 10%, 20% and in the cases of
benefits decreasing at 10%, 20%, biogas production is still attractive investment. The
findings can be extended to promote biogas production from agricultural wastes
extensively for country energy consumption reduction.