Performance of microbial electrolysis cell for hydrogen production operated with a low cost chitosan-based membrane

RODRÍGUEZ SARAI; GONZÁLEZ PABON MARÍA JESUS; CORTÓN EDUARDO; CARDEÑA RENÉ,

Santiago de Querétaro

Congreso; 1st- Latin American Young Water Professionals Conference; 2018

Universidad Autónoma de México. Juriquilla

Wastewater (WW) treatment processes are technologies used for public health management. Recently, biorefinery approaches have been considered for WW treatment, since it is an alternative to confront the global energy crisis (Yu et al., 2018). Whereby, bio-electrochemical systems (BESs) such as microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) have a great potential to be used as biorefinery meanwhile hydrogen gas can be produce using WW as substrate (Cercado et al., 2016; Kadier et al., 2016). MEC employee microbial metabolic pathway to degrade organic matter. Nonetheless, materials which MECs are constructed (e.g. electrodes and membranes) are not competitive with newly technologies. (Jiang et al., 2018). It is for that we working at characterization of MEC for hydrogen production using industrial-low cost materials. Electrodes were fabricated by Carbon Nanotubes (CNT) and Chitosan. Poly(vinyl) alcohol and chitosan were used for membrane synthesis. Characterizations of MEC reactors were done through biological, physicochemical and electrochemical techniques.