Resource recovery in potato chips processing industry: green bioelectricity production using continuous mediatorless microbial fuel cell

ABSTRACT

Potato chips processing industry generally discharge large volumes of organic loaded-wastewater and significant amounts of peels as solid wastes. In this study, a dual chamber microbial fuel cell (MFC) was setup, and continuously operated for 120 days for combined biotreatment of potato chips processing wastewater (PCW) and waste potato peels (PP) associated with electricity generation. The discarded PP were dried, grinded, and added to the PCW as a powder at concentrations of 0, 2.5, and 5 g PP/L resulted in three different organic loadings, denoted as OL0, OL1, and OL2, respectively. The results demonstrated significant removal efficiency of COD up to 99% with maximum power generation of 612.5, 800, and 1012.5 mW/m³ for OL0, OL1, and OL2, respectively. Butler–Volmer–Monod model was proposed to describe the overpotential-polarization curve for the MFC. Significant agreement was observed between the predicated and experimental results with determination coefficient (R²) values > 0.91.

KEYWORDS:

• Microbial fuel cell
• wastewater
• electricity generation
• potato peels
• Butler Volmer- Monod model

Acknowledgments

The authors sincerely acknowledge the staff of Al-Enas Laboratory for Microbiology Analysis and the staff of the Salah Al-din Bakery & Pastry factory in Tikrit city, Iraq for their technical support Also, the authors extended their appreciation to the Department of Environmental Engineering at University of Baghdad.

Authors contribution

AY and ZZ conceived and designed research. ZZ designed and supervised he experimental work. AY conducted experiments and contributed the required analytical tools. AY and ZZ analyzed data. ZZ wrote and reviewed the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript.