Development of microbial fuel cell using speek/cloisite 15A membrane for electricity generation from palm oil mill effluent

Abstract

A microbial fuel cell (MFC) is a device capable to convert chemical energy to electrical energy by using microorganisms. Typically, microbial fuel cell is recognized with its dual chamber system. In this dual chamber system, the membrane acts as the separator that divides anode and cathode as the cell compartment. One aspect in microbial fuel cell (MFC) development involves the challenge in finding suitable membrane as separator. Excellent membrane should be low in cost, high in proton conductivity, limits substrate and oxygen diffusivity. In this work, a composite membrane constituting a sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone) (SPEEK) and cloisite 15A is studied meanwhile the palm oil mill effluent (POME) waste water was used as the source for electricity generation. The addition of organoclays; cloisite 15A to the SPEEK dope solution during the preparation of the membrane is expected to overcome the limitation imposed by the pure SPEEK and extensively studied membrane Nafion, a sulfonated tetrafluoroethylene. The addition of cloisite 15 A indeed improve the overall membrane properties. The water uptake, mechanical strength and oxygen diffusivity for the SPEEK/Cloisite membrane is 22.6%, 46.2 MPa and 0.36x10-5 cm2 s-1 exceeding the performance of Nafion and pure SPEEK. During MFC operation, the maximum power density was obtained by Nafion with 3.5 mW/m2 slightly higher than SPEEK/Cloisite with power density of 2.8 mW/m2. The assessment on the POME properties shows that the COD values, total ammonia and total nitrogen were reduced in in all three MFCs using SPEEK/Cloisite, SPEEK and Nafion membrane respectively.