EUBCE 2024 - Jung-Jeng SU - Research and Development of a Sediment Microbial Fuel Cell Module for a Livestock Wastewater Treatment System

Research and Development of a Sediment Microbial Fuel Cell Module for a Livestock Wastewater Treatment System

Short Introductive summary

The purpose of this research is to recover extra micro-electricity and biogas from the anaerobic digestion of livestock wastewater simultaneously. Our team initially applied basic two-chamber microbial fuel cell (MFC) reactors using piggery wastewater as fuel to characterize the patterns of micro-electricity from sediment microbial populations. Analytic results of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) show that the current of this MFC includes a direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC), which may be related to the behavior of the microbes studied in ours. Besides, pilot-scale (180-L polyethylene tanks) experiments were performed using a self-designed and self-assembled sediment MFC module (SMFC) with cattle wastewater as fuel in a cattle farm. All micro-electricity produced from the SMFCs was stored in 10 capacitors with inductors. For practical applications, integrating 10 serial/parallel capacitors and a DC-to-DC booster can charge a rechargeable battery for at least 2.5 min. Hopefully, the SMFC can be applied to support the electricity needed for DC aerators in the automatic piggery wastewater treatment soon.

J. Su, National Taiwan University, Taipei, TAIWAN
J. Su, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, TAIWAN
L. Huang, National Taiwan University, Taipei, TAIWAN
W. Chen, National Taiwan University, Taipei, TAIWAN