Ammonia/ammonium removal/recovery from wastewaters using bioelectrochemical systems (BES): A review.

This review updates the current research efforts on using BES to recover NH/NH, highlighting the novel configurations and introducing the working principles and the applications of microbial fuel cell (MFC), microbial electrolysis cell (MEC), microbial desalination cell (MDC), and microbial electrosynthesis cell (MESC) for NH/NH removal/recovery. However, commonly studied BES processes for NH/NH removal/recovery are energy intensive with external aeration needed for NH stripping being the largest energy input. In such a process bipolar membranes used for yielding a local alkaline pool recovering NH is not cost-effective. This gives a chance to microbial electrosynthesis which turned out to be a potential alternative option to approach circular bioeconomy. Furtherly, the reactor volume and NH/NH removal/recovery efficiency has a weakly positive correlation, indicating that there might be other factors controlling the reactor performance that are yet to be investigated.