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Published on: October 15, 2015
Implementation of a Sulfide-Air Fuel Cell Coupled to a Sulfate-Reducing Biocathode for Elemental Sulfur Recovery
Enric Blázquez1, David Gabriel1, Juan Antonio Baeza1
1GENOCOV Research Group, Department of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Barcelona, Spain.
Abstract:
Bio-electrochemical systems (BES) are a flexible biotechnological platform that can be employed to treat several types of wastewaters and recover valuable products concomitantly. Sulfate-rich wastewaters usually lack an electron donor; for this reason, implementing BES to treat the sulfate and the possibility of recovering the elemental sulfur (S0) offers a solution to this kind of wastewater. This study proposes a novel BES configuration that combines bio-electrochemical sulfate reduction in a biocathode with a sulfide-air fuel cell (FC) to recover S0. The proposed system achieved high elemental sulfur production rates (up to 386 mg S0-S L-1 d-1) with 65% of the sulfate removed recovered as S0 and a 12% lower energy consumption per kg of S0 produced (16.50 ± 0.19 kWh kg-1 S0-S) than a conventional electrochemical S0 recovery system.
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Spontaneous redox reactions occur abundantly in nature. The chemical reaction occurring in a disposable AA battery powering our remote controls is one such example of a spontaneous redox reaction. Another example is the immersion of coiled copper wire into an aqueous silver nitrate solution. The reaction shows a gradual, visually impressive color change from colorless to bright blue and the formation of a grey precipitate on the copper wire. In this experiment,...

