Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, P.O. Box 33, Al-Khoud 123, Muscat, Sultanate of Oman E-mail:
Process Engineering Department, International Maritime College, Sohar, Sultanate of Oman.
Water Sci Technol. 2021 May;83(10):2389-2403. doi: 10.2166/wst.2021.145.
The green and cost-effective nature of the microbial desalination cell (MDC) make it a promising alternative for future sustainable desalination. However, MDC suffers from a low desalination rate that inhibits it being commercialized. External resistance (R) is one of the factors that significantly affect the desalination rate in MDCs, which is still under debate. This research, for the first time, investigated the impact of R on MDCs with different internal resistance (R) of the system to discover the optimal range of R for efficient MDC performance. The results showed that the effect of R on desalination rate (2.52 mg/h) was quite low when the R of MDC was high (200 Ω). However, operating the MDC with a low R (67 Ω) significantly improved the desalination rate (9.85 mg/h) and current generation. When MDC was operated with a low R the effect of variable R on desalination and current generation was noticeable. Therefore, low R (67 Ω) MDC was used to select the optimum R when the optimal range was found to be R ≪ R, R < R, R ≈ R (ranging from 1-69 Ω) to achieve the highest desalination rates (10.41-8.59 mg/h). The results showed the superior effect of R on desalination rate before selecting the optimal range of R in the outer circuit.
微生物脱盐电池 (MDC) 的绿色环保和成本效益使其成为未来可持续脱盐的有前途的替代方案。然而，MDC 的脱盐率较低，限制了其商业化。外部电阻 (R) 是显著影响 MDC 脱盐率的因素之一，这仍存在争议。本研究首次研究了 R 对具有不同系统内阻 (R) 的 MDC 的影响，以发现高效 MDC 性能的最佳 R 范围。结果表明，当 MDC 的 R 较高 (200 Ω) 时，R 对脱盐率 (2.52 mg/h) 的影响相当低。然而，以低 R (67 Ω) 操作 MDC 可显著提高脱盐率 (9.85 mg/h) 和电流生成。当 MDC 以低 R 运行时，可变 R 对脱盐和电流生成的影响是显而易见的。因此，当发现最佳范围为 R << R、R < R、R ≈ R (范围为 1-69 Ω) 时，使用低 R (67 Ω) MDC 来选择最佳 R，以实现最高脱盐率 (10.41-8.59 mg/h)。结果表明，在外电路选择最佳 R 范围之前，R 对脱盐率的影响更为显著。
