The impact of anode acclimation strategy on microbial electrolysis cell treating hydrogen fermentation effluent

Abstract

The impact of different anode acclimation methods for enhancing hydrogen production in microbial electrolysis cell (MEC) was investigated in this study. The anodes were first acclimated in microbial fuel cells using acetate, butyrate and corn stalk fermentation effluent (CSFE) as substrate before moving into MECs, respectively. Subsequently, CSFE was used as feedstock in all the three MECs. The maximum hydrogen yield with the anode pre-acclimated with butyrate (5.21±0.24L H/L CSFE) was higher than that pre-acclimated with acetate (4.22±0.19L H/L CSFE) and CSFE (4.55±0.14L H/L CSFE). The current density (480±11A/m) and hydrogen production rate (4.52±0.13m/m/d) with the anode pre-acclimated with butyrate were also higher that another two reactors. These results demonstrated that the anode biofilm pre-acclimated with butyrate has significant advantages in CSFE treatment and could improve the performance of hydrogen production in MEC.

Degradation of pharmaceuticals from wastewater in a 20-L continuous flow bio-electro-Fenton (BEF) system

“…The injection volume was 10 µL. In addition, the apparent rate constants for removing six selected pharmaceuticals under different operating parameters were determined based on a previous study (Li et al, 2017a;Li et al, 2017c;Nadais et al, 2018).…”

“…Fe 3+ + e -→ Fe 2+ (3) BEF process has been developed for treating pollutants in diverse wastewaters, like dyes (Li et al, 2017c;Zhang et al, 2015b), pharmaceuticals (Nadais et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2015a) and municipal, agricultural and industrial pollutants (Hassan et al, 2017;Yong et al, 2017;Yu et al, 2018). Though promising, most studies have been carried out in labs, with reactor sizes in the hundreds of milliliters and the scaling-up feasibility of these systems has never been explored.…”

Bio-electro-Fenton processes for wastewater treatment: Advances and prospects

“…Scale-up of MFC and MEC from batch experiments to pilot-scale for wastewater treatment in anode chamber has been reported, which could offer insights into the scaling-up of bio-electro-Fenton process [95][96][97]. Moreover, the anodic electrode arrangement strategies have significant influence on the wastewater treatment in lab and pilot-scale reactors [96,98]. Nevertheless, the removal efficiency of POPs in pilot-scale bio-electro-Fenton system is still unknown.…”

Combined freezing-thawing pretreatment and microbial electrolysis cell for enhancement of highly concentrated organics degradation from dewatered sludge

“…The properties of MECs fed with raw and F/ T-pretreated DS are summarized in Table 2. Several previous studies [12,24,25] on the MEC performance fed with highly concentrated organics were compared with this study ( Table 3).…”