scale are often performed imposing a fixed temperature throughout
the process that may create artificial or unrealistic conditions
(Mason and Milke, 2005). Finally, the reproducibility of reactorscale
composting has been rarely reported (Schloss et al., 2000;
Petiot and de Guardia, 2004), although it conditions the potential
use of the results for comparing different composting mixtures or
conditions.
Thus, this work seeks to design an experimental new device to
perform realistic composting while reducing the pilot volume and
the mass of composted wastes and to assess the performance and
the reproducibility of this small-scale composting system regarding
the chemical and biochemical transformations of organic matter.
A small-scale reactor system that enables self-heating in six
parallel replicates was created, and it was tested using a classical
waste mixture of sewage sludge and green waste.