Abstract
Microbial fuel cell (MFC) is currently considered a promising technology for wastewater treatment. This study aims to evaluate the feasibility of a double-chamber MFC in terms of: (i) operating mode (batch mode, self-circulation mode, single-continuous mode) of anolyte on the nutrient accumulation in the catholyte, (ii) aeration conditions (anode effluent with aeration supplied in catholyte; anode effluent without aeration supplied in catholyte; cathode effluent with aeration supplied in catholyte and cathode effluent without aeration supplied in catholyte) on the nutrient recovery and (iii) types of separators (cation exchange membrane (CEM), forward osmosis (FO), and nonwoven (NW)) to remove nutrients toward their recovery from municipal wastewater. Results showed that there was no negligible increase in the phosphate concentration of the catholyte at the three different modes but accumulation of ammonium. At different aeration conditions, nutrients can be recovered by chemical precipitation at high pH generated by the MFC itself. Basically, phosphate was removed by microbial absorption and recovered by chemical precipitation while ammonium was accumulated by current generation and recovered as precipitates. It was found that double-chamber MFC with the CEM as the separator reported the best nutrients removal with >97.58% of NH4+-N and >94.9% of PO43−-P removed/recovered, followed by the MFC with the nonwoven and FO membrane, respectively. Thus, the double-chamber MFC is feasible for recovering nutrients in a comprehensive bioelectrochemical system.
Highlights
Phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) as nutrients are responsible for several serious environmental problems such as eutrophication in water bodies, especially if both are in quantities in the aquatic environment
This study aims to evaluate the feasibility of a double-chamber Microbial fuel cell (MFC) in terms of: (i) operating mode of anolyte on the nutrient accumulation in the catholyte, (ii) aeration conditions on the nutrient recovery and (iii) types of separators (cation exchange membrane (CEM), forward osmosis (FO), and nonwoven (NW)) to remove nutrients toward their recovery from municipal wastewater
It could be seen that the concentration of NH4+-N in the catholyte gradually increased after fresh synthetic wastewater was fed into the anode chamber no matter what the operation modes of the anolyte were. This may be attributed to the pathway of the ammonium transfer across the cationexchange membrane (CEM) from the anode chamber to the cathode chamber in the doublechamber MFC
Summary
Phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) as nutrients are responsible for several serious environmental problems such as eutrophication in water bodies, especially if both are in quantities in the aquatic environment. P and N exist in phosphate and ammonium ions, respectively. It should be noted here that phosphate and ammonium are essential to plants and crops in agriculture and always used for direct land application in the form of chemical fertilizers. Phosphate as the nonrenewable resource is mainly derived from natural phosphate-based rocks, but it has been estimated that the global phosphate deposits will completely run out in 30-300 years [1]. This means the production of phosphate-based fertilizers will end at some point. The role of phosphate in the fertilizer production will not be replaced by any other materials [2]
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