SIMULTANEOUS PROCESS OF DESALINATION AND HOUSEHOLD WASTEWATER TREATMENT IN MICROBIAL DESALINATION FUEL CELL: EVALUATION OF DIFFERENT MIXED CULTURES

Freshwater resources are using up due to a growing demand for water due to the increasing population growth. On the other hand, population growth has triggered massive wastewater per day in large cities. This problem has led to the development of recent techniques such as reverse osmosis and electrodialysis for desalination and a variety of treatment methods for wastewaters which are all energy and cost consuming. Thus, developing a sustainable and cost-effective technique is essential to fulfill various needs from treatment to desalination. An alternative for simultaneous desalination, wastewater treatment, and generation of electricity is to use a microbial desalination fuel cell (MDC) in which an anode, a cathode, and a desalination chamber are connected with an anion exchange membrane (AEM) and a cation exchange membrane (CEM) (Lauren et al., ۲۰۰۹). Figure ۱ presents a schematic of different components of MDC.