Increasing Desalination by Mitigating Anolyte pH Imbalance Using Catholyte Effluent Addition in a Multi-Anode Bench Scale Microbial Desalination Cell
Type
ArticleKAUST Grant Number
KUS-11-003-13Date
2013-07-11Online Publication Date
2013-07-11Print Publication Date
2013-09-03Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/598611
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A microbial desalination cell (MDC) uses exoelectrogenic bacteria to oxidize organic matter while desalinating water. Protons produced from the oxidation of organics at the anode result in anolyte acidification and reduce performance. A new method was used here to mitigate anolyte acidification based on adding non-buffered saline catholyte effluent from a previous cycle to the anolyte at the beginning of the next cycle. This method was tested using a larger-scale MDC (267 mL) containing four anode brushes and a three cell pair membrane stack. With an anolyte salt concentration increased by an equivalent of 75 mM NaCl using the catholyte effluent, salinity was reduced by 26.0 ± 0.5% (35 g/L NaCl initial solution) in a 10 h cycle, compared to 18.1 ± 2.0% without catholyte addition. This improvement was primarily due to the increase in buffering capacity of the anolyte, although increased conductivity slightly improved performance as well. There was some substrate loss from the anolyte by diffusion into the membrane stack, but this was decreased from 11% to 2.6% by increasing the anolyte conductivity (7.6 to 14 mS/cm). These results demonstrated that catholyte effluent can be utilized as a useful product for mitigating anolyte acidification and improving MDC performance. © 2013 American Chemical Society.Citation
Davis RJ, Kim Y, Logan BE (2013) Increasing Desalination by Mitigating Anolyte pH Imbalance Using Catholyte Effluent Addition in a Multi-Anode Bench Scale Microbial Desalination Cell. ACS Sustainable Chem Eng 1: 1200–1206. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/sc400148j.Sponsors
The authors thank Siemens Corp. for kindly donating an electrodialysis reactor as a design reference for this project, Hiroyuki Kashima for his help with ion chromatography, and Dr. Xiuping Zhu for conducting the HPLC analysis. This research was supported by Award KUS-11-003-13 from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1021/sc400148j