Architectural engineering of bioelectrochemical systems from the perspective of polymeric membrane separators: A comprehensive update on recent progress and future prospects

Abstract

Significant advances in the design of bioelectrochemical systems (BES) have promoted these applications to be seen as contemporary biotechnological platforms. However, notable issues in system architecture are still to be addressed and overcome, in particular concerning the membrane separators, which rely widely on polymers. These architectural components play a key-role in facilitating the transport of ions (i.e. protons) between the (compartments containing the) electrodes and therefore, their properties substantially influence the overall BES performance. This article aims presenting an up-to-date survey on the important accomplishments and promising outlooks with polymer-based membranes (both porous/non-porous, charged/uncharged) applied in BES (first and foremost microbial fuel cells, MFCs) that could drive this technology towards enhanced efficiency. Because of the interdisciplinary concept of BES, it attracts attention from scientists and engineers involved in environmental biotechnology, microbial electrochemistry and applied material sciences and as a result, this review paper would target the audience of these fields with particular interest on the progress with membrane separators fabricated with various polymeric materials.

A review of the innovative gas separation membrane bioreactor with mechanisms for integrated production and purification of biohydrogen

“…In most cases, membrane separators applied in MET are chemicallysynthetized from polymers (Bakonyi et al, 2018, Koók et al, 2019a. In addition to those, ceramics (Khalili et .…”

“…This could facilitate the understanding of plausible cross-effects, in particular membrane properties and underlying microbial consortia. In addition to oxygen transport, following the transfer of ions-and protons could also provide complementary information to evaluate the membrane behavior and its change over time (Bakonyi et al, 2018).…”

“…The efficient charge balancing (ion and proton transfer) of the membrane is one of the most essential requirements to achieve good operational performance in MET (Bakonyi et al, 2018). In real applications, the widely used PEMs are not ideally selective to proton as they allow the passage of various ions at the same time.…”

“…For instance, the above-mentioned membrane material, Nafion, had been previously exploited for FC (Kraytsberg and Ein-Eli, 2016;Peighambardoust et al, 2010) and was thereafter adopted for MFC (seen as a FC-derivative technology) (Harnisch et al, 2008;Rozendal et al, 2006). Nafion was considered for long time as the primary reference material for two-chamber MFC (Bakonyi et al, 2018). However, the deployment of Nafion and other ion exchange membrane materials in MFC has revealed severe weaknesses, such as low proton selectivity, high gas and substrate crossover, high fabrication cost (Chae et al, 2014;Park et al, 2017).…”

“…considered as cathode and anode chambers, respectively), while C2 is the proton concentration in the anode solution at time t. After multiplying kH with the membrane thickness, the proton diffusion coefficient of a particular membrane can be displayed(Bakonyi et al, 2018). Alternative to Eq.…”