Moving toward sustainability by a novel, low-cost and integrated electrolysis-desalination system for simultaneous green hydrogen generation, wastewater treatment, and zero-waste desalination

Summary

One efficient way to produce green hydrogen is to use the electrolysis process. Hence, the primary goal of this research is to discover an affordable way for satisfying both the hunger of industry and human thirst through designing, fabricating and exploiting an efficient and novel microbial desalination electrolysis technology by using an integrating approach. This technology is targeted to be utilized as a decentralized wastewater treatment facility while generating biohydrogen, and desalinating seawater simultaneously. Moreover, the technology aims to produce almost zero brine/waste by recovering value-added products to highlight its circular economy aspect. This project could perfectly address the objectives of localizing electrolysis technology to produce green hydrogen while treating wastewater and desalinating seawater at the same time with a low-cost approach. Likewise, it will reinforce and synchronize university cooperation with the future needs of the industry and prepare the students for taking such technical roles in advanced technology in the near future.

Objectives

1. The main objective of the research is to develop a low cost and novel design of microbial electrolysis desalination cell (MEDC) as a prototype to facilitate their implementation in an actual scale.
2. The details to achieve the objective of this research are listed below as follows:
3. To design and/ fabricate MEDC reactor and commission the control system of MEDC
4. To treat the wastewater, desalinate brackish/seawater, and produce hydrogen gas simultaneously by MEDC reactor and establish a real-time monitoring and controlling system.
5. To evaluate the performance of the MEDC in terms of wastewater treatment.
6. To evaluate the performance of the MEDC in terms of desalination rate using different types of salt (brackish, seawater and produced water) and different salt concentration removal.
7. To evaluate the performance of the MEDC in terms of hydrogen gas production rate and respective bioelectrochemical analyses (oxidation and reduction rate, internal resistance, hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) onset potential).
8. To evaluate the performance of the MEDC in terms of value-added product recovery in form of acid and bae.
9. To optimize performance of the system through adjustment of the design fitted for scaling up.

Funding Agency

MOHERI

Collaboration

Collaborator 1: Sultan Qaboos University, Oman

Collaborator 2: Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Malaysia