Electrogenesis reduces the combustion efficiency of sewage sludge

Jinxing Ma, Zhiwei Wang, Chaowei Zhu, Yinlun Xu and Zhichao Wu

Applied Energy, 2014, vol. 114, issue C, 283-289

Abstract: Electrogenesis in microbial fuel cells (MFCs) is a promising approach to extract useful energy from sewage sludge. However, its impact on ultimate sludge disposal (e.g., incineration) has not been well evaluated. In the present work, thermogravimetry and differential scanning calorimetry were carried out to investigate the combustion efficiency of recovered organic matter (ROM) and waste activated sludge (WAS) in the electrogenesis process. In order to reduce the dimensionality of thermograms and to identify the predominant reactions, principal component analysis (PCA) was used for data processing. Two principal components (PC1 and PC2) were extracted from the derivative thermogravimetry, including three exothermic reactions associated with terrestrial organic matter, metabolic products, and acetylated substances. The variation of thermal kinetic characteristics revealed that energy densities of ROM and WAS were decreased after electrogenesis, and the thermograms shifted towards higher reaction temperatures, suggesting that electrogenesis might reduce the combustion efficiency of sewage sludge. Although no power was produced in open-circuit MFCs, more than 20% of the energy content of ROM and WAS was lost during the fermentation process, indicating that low Coulombic efficiency is inevitable in the treatment of sewage sludge with MFCs.

Keywords: Electrogenesis; Sewage sludge; Combustion; Thermogravimetric analysis; Principal component analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261913007964
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:114:y:2014:i:c:p:283-289

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2013.09.049

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().