A Combined Microbial Fuel Cell and Adsorption System for Bio-energy Production and Wastewater Treatment

Abstract

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are electrochemical conversion devices, which are able to accomplish simultaneous electricity generation and wastewater treatment. Integrating MFC with other unit operations or processes has been a trend in recent years for better pollutants removal and greater bio-energy generation. In the present study, an air-cathode MFC integrated with adsorption hybrid system (MFC-AHS) had been designed and fabricated from cost effective materials in order to bring the overall design closer to large-scale application. Palm oil mill effluent (POME) which is rich in organic matters had demonstrated the potential of converting the wastewater into bio-energy by applying POME to the MFC-AHS as the source of inoculums and substrate. The performance between MFC-AHS was compared to the standalone adsorption system and results had demonstrated great pollutants removals of the integrated system especially for chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD3), total organic carbon (TOC), total volatile solids (TVS), ammoniacal nitrogen (NH3-N) and total nitrogen (TN) because such system combines the advantages of each individual unit