Enhancing the Performance of Microbial Fuel Cell by Using Chloroform Pre-treated Mixed Anaerobic Sludge to Control Metha
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Enhancing the Performance of Microbial Fuel Cell by Using Chloroform Pre-treated Mixed Anaerobic Sludge to Control Methanogenesis in Anodic Chamber V. Tholia 1 & B. Neethu 2 & G. D. Bhowmick 3 & M. M. Ghangrekar 2 Received: 16 August 2020 / Accepted: 8 November 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Formation of methane in the anodic chamber of a microbial fuel cell (MFC) indicates an energy inefficiency in electricity generation as the energy required for electrogenesis gets redirected to methanogenesis. The hypothesis of this research is that inhibition of methanogenesis in the mixed anaerobic anodic inoculum is associated with an enhanced activity of the electrogenic bacterial consortia. Hence, the primary objective of this investigation is to evaluate the ability of chloroform to inhibit the methanogenesis at different dosing to enhance the activity of electrogenic consortia in MFC. A higher methane inhibition and hence an enhanced performance of MFC was achieved when mixed anaerobic sludge, collected from septic tank, was used as inoculum after pretreatment with 0.25% (v/v) chloroform dosing (MFC-0.25CF). The MFC-0.25CF attained a maximum power density of 8.51 W/m3, which was more than twice as that of MFC inoculated with untreated sludge. Also, a clear correlation between the chloroform dosing, methane inhibition, wastewater treatment, and power generation was established, which demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique in enhancing power generation in MFC along with adequate biodegradation of organic matter present in wastewater at an optimum chloroform dosing of 0.25% (v/v) to inhibit methanogenesis. Keywords Chloroform . Enhancing electrogenesis . Microbial fuel cell . Suppressing methanogenesis . Wastewater treatment
* M. M. Ghangrekar [email protected]
1
School of Water Resources, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India
2
Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India
3
Department of Agricultural and Food Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India
Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology
Introduction The electrogenic bacterial community, which serves as anodic inoculum in microbial fuel cell (MFC), has received much attention in recent years to enhance the performance of it [1–3]. The energy recovery from MFC using pure-culture of electrogenic strain is superior to mere anaerobic mixed culture [4]. However, substrate specificity in case of pure culture as well as the impracticality in treating real wastewater has prompted researchers to use mixed culture of inoculum by developing techniques to suppress the activity of the major competing microorganisms to electrogenic bacteria, i.e., methanogens. As a result, the inhibitory effect of chemicals, like acid/alkali [5], 2-bromoethanesulfonate (BES) [6, 7], iodopropane [8], and nitro-compounds like ammonia [9], on methanogens was given much focus in the past research. Most of
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