Inventor: Prof. Dr. Zainab Ziad Ismail/Department of Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Baghdad
Abstract
Increasing the global demand for clean and cost-effective energy sources led to develop an emerging technology that can make advantage of both wastewater treatment and energy-production in a single bio-electrochemical system known as Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC). In the present study, a novel application of Microbial Osmotic Fuel Cell (MOFC) for oil extraction-associated waste provided an early effort to investigate the performance of a hybrid design of MOFC for simultaneous treatment of real domestic wastewater, bioenergy generation and desalination of real produced water obtained from a local oil field.
A three-chambered MOFC provided with forward osmosis (FO) membrane and cation exchange membrane (CEM) was inoculated with activated sludge and fueled with actual domestic wastewater. The real produced water was used as the draw solution. Results revealed that for MOFC operated with real produced water, the maximum removal efficiency of COD from wastewater, water flux, TDS removal efficiency from produced water, water flux, power density, generated current density, and power yield were 92%, 4.17 LMH at 20 atmo, 80%, 48.52 mW/m2, 136.30 mA/m2, and 7.46 W/kg CODR, respectively.