A Multifunctional Green Technology for Simultaneous Desalination, Organics Removal and Sulfate Reduction

Microbial desalination cell is one of the cost and energy effective methods that may help people to get access to desalinated water mainly for irrigation and industrial usage while treating their wastewater without energy infrastructure. This study used a three-chamber microbial desalination cell to generate electricity from wastewater as the driving force of desalination. Therefore, organic matters in the wastewater were oxidized to produce electricity due to the exoelectrogenic microorganisms. Moreover, to increase the system application, sulfate containing wastewater was reduced in the cathode to not only reduce the cost of the system but also to reduce this hazardous waste in an inexpensive system. Therefore, MDC studied in this research showed three applications of desalination, organics removal and sulfate removal in one system. Furthermore, it was found that salt concentration in the middle chamber plays a significant role on the internal resistance of MDC and hence on the desalination rate. Lower desalination rate at lower salt concentration in the desalination chamber could be explained by the high internal resistance of the system. Therefore, integrating MDC with other suitable techniques for desalination of lower salt concentrations could overcome this challenge, i.e., adsorption.

کلیدواژه ها:

Microbial desalination cell ، wastewater ، organics ، sulphate ، adsorption