Energy Production and Storage in Bioelectrochemical Systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Bioelectrochemical systems (BESs) were introduced only about 15 years ago. Nevertheless, these systems have attracted considerable attention of the scientific and engineering communities as demonstrated by an exponentially growing number of publications and several scale-up attempts. Wastewater treatment was one of the first proposed BES applications and it remains at the focus of research efforts worldwide, as this technology perfectly fits future scenarios of renewable energy production. Advances in understanding the microbiology of BESs and improved electrode materials have led to orders-of-magnitude performance increase. Yet, both capital and operating costs of BES-based wastewater treatment systems remain high, thus requiring further research in improved process design and control.***One important feature of BESs that became obvious in our recent experiments and which is largely overlooked so far is the significant internal capacitance of BESs such as Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) and Microbial Electrolysis Cells (MECs). Indeed, in these systems both anode and cathode are made of highly conductive materials with large surface areas. Also, the electrodes are covered in electroactive biofilms with additional charge storage capacity. BESs can be operated using inexpensive carbon sources, such as wastewater. Therefore, BESs could combine wastewater treatment (e.g. municipal or agricultural wastewater) with energy production. Simultaneously, charge storage in electroactive biofilms could and should be exploited for improved performance and, eventually, for electricity storage (e.g for fast on-demand return to the grid during peak loads).***Overall, the proposed research program will be aimed at the development of novel microbial electrochemical technologies (METs), which would combine wastewater treatment with energy production and storage. This objective will be achieved through a combination of experimental and modeling techniques, where advanced process models will be developed and then used to design microbial electrochemical reactors (MFCs and MECs) and advanced real-time process control methods. The proposed reactor designs and operating strategies will be experimentally validated to confirm technology performance as well as to provide comprehensive training of graduate students.