Up-scaling microbial fuel cell systems for the treatment of real textile dye wastewater and bioelectricity recovery

ABSTRACT

In this work the energy recovery in microbial fuel cell was studied by electrically stacking its three individual units into series and parallel arrangements. The power output was higher in parallel stacking by 2.07 and 14.77 times than series and individual units respectively. The rate of degradation of dye wastewater was in order of individual Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) < series stack < parallel stack. The corn cob biochar was used as an additive in the MFC to improve the efficiency of the individual MFC unit. The addition of 0.5 g corn cob biochar enhanced the power output to 38.6 mW/m² from 0.47 mW/m² in the MFC individual unit without the biochar additive. The simultaneous COD reduction, TDS reduction and decolourisation of dye wastewater achieved are 82.14%, 68% and 74.8% respectively. The current work demonstrates that the dose of biochar and parallel stacking are a framework to achieve enhanced dye removal and bioenergy recovery via microbial fuel cell.

KEYWORDS:

• Bioenergy
• biochar
• bioelectricity
• MFC
• dye wastewater

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Manipal University Jaipur for granting access to research facilities; the Science and Engineering Research Board, Government of India (File No: ECR/2016/00271) for the financial support; and the Material Research Centre facility at MNIT, Jaipur for the SEM & FTIR analysis in the study.

Authors’ contributions

Sonu carried out the research, wrote and revised the article. Syed did the SEM & FTIR analysis. Sogani designed the research and supervised the research progress.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.