Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, China.
Chemosphere. 2013 Apr;91(5):623-8. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2012.12.068. Epub 2013 Jan 30.
The microbial fuel cell (MFC) is an emerging technology, which uses exoelectrogenic microorganisms to oxidize organic matter in the wastewater to produce electricity. However, the low energy output limits its application in practice. Capacitive deionization (CDI), an electrochemically controlled method for deionization by the adsorption of ions in the electrical double layer region at an electrode-solution interface, requires a low external power supply. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the MFC driven CDI (MFC-CDI) technology to integrate deionization with wastewater treatment and electricity production. Taking advantage of the low potential requirement of CDI, voltage generated from a continuous flow MFC could be used to drive the CDI to achieve removal of the electrolyte to a stable status. The results indicated that among the three connection types of MFCs including single-, series-, and parallel-configuration, the parallel connection of two MFCs resulted in the highest potential (0.63V) applied to CDI and the conductivity removal of NaCl solution was more than 60%. The electrosorption capacities under different electrolyte concentrations of 50, 100 and 150 mg L(-1) were 150, 346 and 295 μg g(-1), respectively. These results suggest that the new MFC-CDI technology, which utilizes energy recovery from the wastewater, has great potential to be an energy saving technology to remove low level dissolved ions from aqueous solutions for the water and wastewater treatment processes.
微生物燃料电池（MFC）是一种新兴技术，它利用放电子微生物将废水中的有机物氧化为电能。然而，其能量输出低的问题限制了其在实际中的应用。电容去离子（CDI）是一种电化学控制的去离子方法，通过在电极-溶液界面的双电层区域吸附离子来实现。它需要的外部电源功率较低。因此，在本研究中，我们研究了 MFC 驱动的 CDI（MFC-CDI）技术，将去离子与废水处理和发电相结合。利用 CDI 的低电位要求，可以利用连续流动 MFC 产生的电压来驱动 CDI，从而实现电解质的去除达到稳定状态。结果表明，在包括单、串联和并联配置在内的三种 MFC 连接类型中，两个 MFC 的并联连接产生的电位最高（0.63V），并能有效去除 NaCl 溶液的电导率，去除率超过 60%。在不同电解质浓度（50、100 和 150 mg/L）下的电吸附容量分别为 150、346 和 295μg/g。这些结果表明，这种利用废水能量回收的新型 MFC-CDI 技术，在从水溶液中去除低浓度溶解离子方面具有很大的潜力，有望成为节能型技术，用于水和废水处理过程。
