Preparation of Porous Ceramic Membranes for Integrated Microbial Fuel Cell – Membrane Bio Reactor (MFC - MBR)
Deep
In the recent decades, energy crisis and environmental pollution are two major challenges facing the world today. Microbial fuel cell (MFC) integrated with membrane bio reactor (MBR) should be a promising technology to address these challenges effectively. However the commercialization of this technology is far from the future owing to the usage of expensive and unstable polymeric membrane as proton conducting membrane. Our goal is to develop novel and low cost material with specific properties like tunable pore size from micro to meso pore range and good proton conducting nature for the application of Integrated MFC-MBR system. Recently polymer derived ceramic material have attracted much attention because of their simple fabrication and processing technique to brought up with extraordinary in thermal, chemical, mechanical properties and also it has tendency to tune pore size from meso to macro pore range and the possibility to optimize the surface characteristics like hydrophobic and hydrophilic nature of the material. These tunings has been done by varying synthesis route, pyrolysing temperature for polymer to ceramic transformation and by addition of filler materials like clay minerals, hygroscopic fillers and carbon materials, to replace polymeric membrane with porous polymer derived ceramic membrane leads to increase in power output and efficient wastewater treatment of integrated MFC-MBR system at reduced cost.
