Modeling temperature and moisture dependent emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from drying dairy cow manure

Abstract

Greenhouse gas emissions due to biological degradation processes of animal wastes are significant sources of air pollution from agricultural areas. The major environmental controls on these microbe-induced gas fluxes are temperature and moisture content. The objective of this study was to model the effects of temperature and moisture content on emissions of CO₂ and CH₄ during the ambient drying process of dairy manure under controlled conditions. Gas emissions were continuously recorded over 15 d with paired fully automated closed dynamic chambers coupled with a Fourier Transformed Infrared gas analyzer. Water content and temperature were measured and monitored with capacitance sensors. In addition, on days 0, 3, 6, 9, 12 and 15, pH, moisture content, dissolved organic carbon and total carbon (TC) were determined. An empirical model derived from the Arrhenius equation confirmed high dependency of carbon emissions on temperature and moisture content. Results indicate that for the investigated dairy manure, 6.83% of TC was lost in the form of CO₂ and 0.047% of TC was emitted as CH₄. Neglecting the effect of temperature, the moisture contents associated with maximum gas emissions were estimated as 0.75 and 0.79 g·g⁻¹ for CO₂ and CH₄, respectively.

Keywords

carbon dioxide / dairy manure / methane / moisture / temperature

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Bill Mace, Ricardo Tejeda, Jean Almonte and Franyel Silfa for their assistance with technical, hardware and software aspects of this work. This research was supported by funds from the USDA-NIFA AFRI Air Quality Program (2010-85112-50524), the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, USA (approved as journal paper no. 8647), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41401225), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China (N150204005) and the Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province, China (201602250).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Enzhu Hu, Pakorn Sutitarnnontr, Markus Tuller, and Scott B. Jones declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

All applicable institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2018. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)