Boron-doped diamond (BDD) is playing an important role in environmental electrochemistry and has been successfully applied to the degradation of various bio-refractory organic pollutants. However, the review concerning recent progress in this research area is still very limited. This mini-review updated recent advances on the removal of three kinds of bio-refractory wastewaters including pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and dyes using BDD electrode. It summarized the important parameters in three electrochemical oxidation processes, i.e., anodic oxidation (AO), electro-Fenton (EF), and photoelectro-Fenton (PEF) and compared their different degradation mechanisms and behaviors. As an attractive improvement of PEF, solar photoelectro-Fenton using sunlight as UV/vis source presented cost-effectiveness, in which the energy consumption for enrofloxacin removal was 0.246 kWh/(g TOC), which was much lower than that of 0.743 and 0.467 kWh/(g TOC) by AO and EF under similar conditions. Finally the existing problems and future prospects in research were suggested.

A simple and cost-effective three-dimensional (3D) polyurethane based activated carbon sponge (ACS) MFC anode was fabricated by carbon black (CB) deposition and ammonium persulfate (APS)/H 2 SO 4 oxidation. This 3D anode (denoted as APS-CB/ACS-SS) possessed remarkable ability with a maximum power density of 926 mW m À2 , which was almost 226 folds that of the untreated ACS (4.1 mW m À2 ) anode, and 2.2 folds compared with a conventional carbon cloth anode MFC (414 mW m À2 ) under the same conditions. Accordingly, the coulombic efficiency (CE) reached 13.4%, an increase of 538.1% compared with the untreated ACS anode. The results of SEM, FTIR, CV and EIS measurements demonstrated that the performance improvement was related to the changes of surface functional groups introduced by APS/H 2 SO 4 oxidation, and the increase of conductivity and catalytic activity by CB coating. This study provided a new approach for cost-effective MFC anode fabrication as well as surface modification to enhance performance. Fig. 6 (a) Voltage output of MFCs with different anodes. (b) Polarization curve and power density curve of MFCs with different anodes.This journal is

A photosynthetic algal microbial fuel cell (PAMFC) was constructed by the introduction of immobilized microalgae (Chlorella vulgaris) into the cathode chamber of microbial fuel cells to fulfill electricity generation, biomass production and wastewater treatment. The immobilization conditions, including the concentration of immobilized matrix, initial inoculation concentration and cross-linking time, were investigated both for the growth of C. vulgaris and power generation. It performed the best at 5 % sodium alginate and 2 % calcium chloride as immobilization matrix, initial inoculation concentration of 10(6) cell/mL and cross-linking time of 4 h. Our findings indicated that C. vulgaris immobilization was an effective and promising approach to improve the performance of PAMFC, and after optimization the power density and Coulombic efficiency improved by 258 and 88.4 %, respectively. Important parameters such as temperature and light intensity were optimized on the performance. PAMFC could achieve a COD removal efficiency of 92.1 %, and simultaneously the maximum power density reached 2,572.8 mW/m(3) and the Coulombic efficiency was 14.1 %, under the light intensity of 5,000 lux and temperature at 25 °C.

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