Abstract
The current societal pursuit towards carbon neutrality would necessitate self-contained systems, ultimately to be independent on the existing water and energy grid. On-site wastewater treatment and reuse can reduce water and waste transportation, in-turn decreasing the carbon footprint for sanitation and hygiene. Electrochemical oxidation processes (EOPs) have emerged as a promising way of decentralized treatment of toilet wastewater and effluent reuse. On the other hand, a distributed and point-of-use electrolysis of locally available, nontraditional water sources including wastewater (effluent) can be involved within the H2 economy, reducing costs and CO2 emission from H2 transportation. This study proposes wastewater electrolysis cells (WECs) for localized wastewater treatment coupled with conversion of redundant renewable energy into H2. In the single-compartment WEC, therefore, oxygen reduction reaction competes with the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER), substantially decreasing the current and energy efficiency. Relatively low-grade H2 (< 60%) in mixture with N2 and CO2 can be utilized by combustion. This approach might be more available and appropriate practice in household and community level. This presentation also introduces recent electrocatalysts to overcome the bottlenecks of WEC such as requirements of precious elements based electrocatalysts and unsatisfactory selectivity of chlorine evolution reaction. These includes i) NiFe2O4 and CoSb2O6 with tiny amounts of Ir, and ii) precious metal cations (Ru and cocatalysts) atomically anchored on Magneli phase Ti4O7.
Published Version
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