Bioenergy recovery associated with treatment of actual meat industry wastewater in blue green algal biocathode based microbial fuel cell: Experimental and modeling study

ABSTRACT

The photosynthetic microbial fuel cell (PMFC) being one of the microbial fuel cells (MFCs) type, seems to be as a great promising technology for wastewater treatment accompanied with renewable energy production. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of blue-green algae-based PMFC for simultaneous biotreatment of actual slaughterhouse wastewater (SWW), ammonium removal, and bioenergy recovery. The experimental results demonstrated significant removal efficiency of chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonium (NH₄⁺) of 99.6 ± 0.5%, and 82.7 ± 1.5%, respectively associated with a power output of 469.6 ± 3.0 mW/m². Butler–Volmer–Monod model was applied to describe the overpotential-polarization curve for the suggested PMFC. A significant agreement was observed between the experimental and predicted results with a determination coefficient (R²) value of 0.974. The observed favorable results reported in this investigation strongly encourage the use of the proposed technique for the treatment of slaughterhouse effluents.

KEYWORDS:

• Blue-green microalgae
• photosynthetic microbial fuel cell
• biotreatment
• bioenergy
• slaughterhouse wastewater

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the staff of Al-Shoula slaughterhouse facility and the Rustamia sewage treatment unit in Baghdad, Iraq, for their cooperation and technical support. Also, the authors appreciate and acknowledge the Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Baghdad for their prop.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).