The performance of laboratory scale experiments in treating synthetic domestic wastewater were conducted with suspended growth (SG) (without media) and attached growth (AG) (with moving media) membrane bioreactors (MBRs). The aim of this study is to compare fouling and the treatment performance of attached growth membrane bioreactor (AGMBR) with suspended growth membrane bioreactor (SGMBR) by assessing the removal of chemical oxygen demand (COD), nitrate, nitrite and ammonia. The finding shows that with 10% of attached growth media, average COD, nitrate, nitrite and nitrogen ammonia removal efficiency for AGMBR were found to be greater than the SGMBR system. AGMBR significantly increased critical flux, (J c) up to 48 L m −2 h −1 , hence producing low final transmembrane pressure (TMP) after cleaning and decreased the total resistance at 5.69 × 10 11 m −1. Addition of cylindrical polythene media resulted in slow TMP increment that prolonged filtration process. In conclusion, AGMBR gave a better treatment performance and could minimize the membrane fouling problem.

Membrane bioreactors (MBR) have gained much attention due to their ability to achieve higher treatment efficiency. However, high external energy consumption in aeration for membrane fouling mitigation has been limiting their application. Microbial fuel cells (MFC) can ideally extract energy from wastewater in the form of electricity and reduce membrane fouling. Thus, the use of MFC‐MBR is rapidly expanding. However, the MFC‐MBR design and operation is not fully mature and further research is needed to optimize the process efficiency and enhance the applicability. This review gives an overview of recent studies on the performances of MFC‐MBR systems, regarding the design and configuration of the integrated system, irrespective of whether optimization was done or not in the operating system.

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Membrane bioreactors (MBRs) and microbial electrochemical systems (MESs) are promising technologies for wastewater treatment and generation of electricity from organic matter. The application of MBRs is limited due to membrane fouling and high energy consumption. The novel design of the coupling system of microbial fuel cell and membrane bioreactor (MFC-MBR), which efficiently combines microbial degradation in MFCs and uses the microelectric field to reduce and mitigate membrane fouling in MBR. The fundamentals of extracellular electron transport, the performance of MFCs, different types of MBR systems, and the novelty of the MFC-MBR coupling system for wastewater treatment are reviewed.