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The effect of the polarised cathode, formate and ethanol on chain elongation of acetate in microbial electrosynthesis

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posted on 2021-02-18, 10:16 authored by Paniz Izadi, Jean-Marie Fontmorin, Bernardino Virdis, Ian M. Head, Eileen Yu
Reduction of CO2 to acetate in microbial electrosynthesis has been widely studied. However, the selective and quantitative production of longer chain chemicals and biofuels is still a bottleneck. Lack of sufficient energy provided by only the cathode electrode in Bio-electrochemical systems during chain elongation is one of the key challenges. It is assumed that additional electron donors than a polarised cathode is required to steer the production towards longer chain of carboxylates than acetate. In this study, formate and ethanol were supplied separately in the reactors fed by CO2 for 45 days in addition to the cathodes poised at −1.0 V vs. Ag/AgCl to investigate their effect on production. Although acetate was still the major product, supplying electron donors directed the production towards more diverse and longer chain organic chemicals than that in presence of the polarised cathode only. Significant improvement in the production of butyrate (×3.8 increase in maximum concentration) and butanol (maximum of 6.8 ± 0.3 mmol C L−1) was observed after supplying formate, while ethanol increased the diversity of the products. Supplying formate and ethanol in reactors for another 30 days under open circuit potential clarified that only ethanol could provide sufficient energy for butyrate production from acetate in the absence of polarised cathode, which reached the highest butyrate concentration of 19.1 ± 2.3 mmol C L−1. Formate was only consumed in presence of polarised cathode. It is proposed in our study that production of C4 products in presence of only cathodic electrode or cathodic electrode and formate could be associated to initial reduction of acetate to ethanol, consumed for production of C4 products through acetate. Trace levels of caproate and hexanol were detected in both reactors supplied with formate and ethanol only in the presence of polarised cathode.

Funding

Liquid Fuel and bioEnergy Supply from CO2 Reduction

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

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ISCF Wave 1: North East Centre for Energy Materials

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

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Resource recovery from wastewater with Bioelectrochemical Systems

Natural Environment Research Council

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Doctoral Training Awards (SAgE DTA, 2015 cohort) from Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering, Newcastle University.

Australian Research Council through Australian Laureate Fellowship FL170100086.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Chemical Engineering

Published in

Applied Energy

Volume

283

Publisher

Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2020-11-14

Publication date

2020-12-02

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

0306-2619

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Eileen Yu. Deposit date: 17 February 2021

Article number

116310

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