One-year operation of 1000-L modularized microbial fuel cell for municipal wastewater treatment

Scale up of Microbial Fuel Cell Stack System for Residential Wastewater Treatment in Continuous Mode Operation

“…Another study achieved a COD removal of 36% (lower than 87 ± 4.5% achieved in this study), attributed to complex and high concentration (2.5 g L −1 of COD) of the swine manure wastewater used, in fact, high concentration wastewaters have proved to decrease the COD removal up to 12% [12]. Likewise, another test achieved a COD removal between 60-70% lower than this study using a similar cell stack and municipal wastewater as substrate [11].…”

“…However, the costs of the components for different MFCs reactors reported in literature are quite different. For example in this study 38% of the cost was consumed by the use of cationic membranes, whereas for Liang et al [11] 80% of the investment went to the PVC-based chambers, titanium mesh-based current collector, and the expensive CEM used. Another system comprising 200 L MFCs with 96 tubular modules used over 60% of the cost (6000 USD) for the CEM [11,13].…”

“…For example in this study 38% of the cost was consumed by the use of cationic membranes, whereas for Liang et al [11] 80% of the investment went to the PVC-based chambers, titanium mesh-based current collector, and the expensive CEM used. Another system comprising 200 L MFCs with 96 tubular modules used over 60% of the cost (6000 USD) for the CEM [11,13]. The cost of the MFC reactor operated in this study can still be further reduced if the materials are purchased at wholesale (cationic membrane, stainless steel mesh, among others).…”

“…COD removal achieved in several studies ranges from 36 to 84%, whereas in the present study the COD removal with MFCSS was 87 ± 4.5%, using similar materials for the anode electrode. A previous work [11], achieved a good COD removal (70-80%) with a working volume of 1000 L, which is the largest volume tested for treating real wastewater, although they used a cascade system consisting of 3 stacks of 3 cells each (with 1 stack only a 33% COD removal was obtained). Besides, an artificial catholyte was used, which had to be aerated constantly, making it not practical for real life implementation.…”

“…The first pilot trial was the "gastrobot", applied in the electronic and robotic field [8]. Recent publications have shown advances in electrode and reactor materials, diverse and novel cell configurations, overall performance in terms of nutrients and contaminants removal and cost analysis; these experiments have been performed in setups that range from 1 to hundreds of liters treated in one batch, with a few attempts at pilot-scale continuous flow based MFC systems [9][10][11][12][13][14].…”