Abstract
The aim of this study was the development of a specifically adapted microbial community for the removal of organic carbon from an industrial wastewater using a bioelectrochemical system. In a first step, ferric iron reducing microorganisms were isolated from the examined industrial wastewater. In a second step, it was tested to what extent these isolates or a cocultivation of the isolates with the exoelectrogenic model organism Geobacter sulfurreducens (G. sulfurreducens) were able to eliminate organic carbon from the wastewater. To establish a stable biofilm on the anode and to analyze the performance of the system, the experiments were conducted first under batch-mode conditions for 21 days. Since the removal of organic carbon was relatively low in the batch system, a similar experiment was conducted under continuous-mode conditions for 65 days, including a slow transition from synthetic medium to industrial wastewater as carbon and electron source and variations in the flow rate of the medium. The overall performance of the system was strongly increased in the continuous- compared to the batch-mode reactor and the highest average current density (1,368 mA/m2) and Coulombic efficiency (54.9%) was measured in the continuous-mode reactor inoculated with the coculture consisting of the new isolates and G. sulfurreducens. The equivalently inoculated batch-mode system produced only 82-fold lower current densities, which were accompanied by 42-fold lower Coulombic efficiencies.
Highlights
IntroductionThe demand of freshwater increased considerably. Social and economic growth and the increase in world population result in an increasing freshwater demand and in a rising energy need (UN-WWAP, 2015; IEA, 2017; Roser and Ortiz-Ospina, 2017)
Over the past decades, the demand of freshwater increased considerably
Microbial fuel cells are bioelectrochemical systems (BES) that generate electrical energy and since waste streams like wastewater accrue in large amounts, these systems gained much attention in BES for Industrial Wastewater Treatment the recent years because they offer a technological possibility to couple the elimination of organic carbon to the production of electrical energy (Winter and Brodd, 2004)
Summary
The demand of freshwater increased considerably. Social and economic growth and the increase in world population result in an increasing freshwater demand and in a rising energy need (UN-WWAP, 2015; IEA, 2017; Roser and Ortiz-Ospina, 2017). Microbial fuel cells are bioelectrochemical systems (BES) that generate electrical energy and since waste streams like wastewater accrue in large amounts, these systems gained much attention in BES for Industrial Wastewater Treatment the recent years because they offer a technological possibility to couple the elimination of organic carbon to the production of electrical energy (Winter and Brodd, 2004). Elimination of this organic carbon is the most energy demanding step in wastewater treatment as it usually necessitates the supply of oxygen as electron acceptor (Heidrich et al, 2011; Gude, 2016). The application of microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology for wastewater treatment would overcome this problem because anodes instead of oxygen are used here as terminal electron acceptor of microbial respiration. The released respiratory electrons are transferred via an external circuit to the cathode where oxygen is reduced
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