A Catalytic Effectiveness Factor for a Microbial Electrolysis Cell Biofilm Model

René Alejandro Flores-Estrella, Victor Alcaraz-Gonzalez and Andreas Haarstrick
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René Alejandro Flores-Estrella: Departamento de Ciencias de la Sustentabilidad, El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Tapachula 30700, Mexico
Victor Alcaraz-Gonzalez: Departamento de Ingeniería Química, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara 44430, Mexico
Andreas Haarstrick: Leichtweiß Institut, Technische Universitat Braunschweig, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 11, 1-18

Abstract: The aim of this work is to propose a methodology to obtain an effectiveness factor for biofilm in a microbial electrolysis cell (MEC) system and use it to reduce a partial differential equation (PDE) biofilm MEC model to an ordinary differential equation (ODE) MEC model. The biofilm mass balances of the different species are considered. In addition, it is considered that all the involved microorganisms are attached to the anodic biological film. Three effectiveness factors are obtained from partial differential equations describing the spatial distributions of potential and substrate in the biofilm. Then, a model reduction is carried out using the global mass balances of the different species in the system. The reduced model with three uncertain but bounded effectiveness factors is evaluated numerically and analyzed in the sense of stability and parametric sensibility to demonstrate its applicability. The reduced ODE model is compared with a validated model taken from the literature, and the results are in good agreement. The biofilm effectiveness factor in MEC systems can be extended to the reduction of PDE models to obtain ODE models that are commonly used in optimization and control problems.

Keywords: microbial electrolysis cell; modeling; biofilm; effectiveness factor; biohydrogen (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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