Treating Simulated Nitrate Pollution Groundwater with Different pH by Microbial Fuel Cell

摘要

Microbial fuel cell (MFC) is regarded as a promising technology to treat waste water and generate electricity simultaneously. MFCs usually work in the water-soluble medium, but the performance of the MFC which works in the porous medium is still unclear. Therefore, in this paper, a sand box was used to construct a dual-chamber MFC to investigate its performance. The MFC was used in porous medium to simulate the environment of groundwater, which was used to investigate the nitrate removal rate and the performance of electricity generation under different pII values. The performance of the MFC electrode was investigated by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The results showed that the maximum power density was 0.003 mW/m(3) (pH = 7.0) and the lowest nitrate concentration was 0.49 mg/L (pH = 8.5). The dominant microbial communities were Comamonadaceae bacterium, Xanthomonas axonopodis et al. Although the MFC was weak in electricity generation, it could offer valuable reference to further experiment.