1.5.2014 to 1.5.2017

Recently, the German Ministry of Research and Education started the funding of projects to investigate and explore the potential of water and wastewater treatment technologies with respect to energy and resources (ERWAS).
The BioBZ project contains six partners and is coordinated by the CUTEC Clausthal Institute for Environmental Research.

The main objective of the BioBZ project is to successfully implement the microbial fuel cell technology into wastewater treatment to (i) further reduce the COD discharge especially for persistent substrates (micropollutants) and thereby (ii) to generate electrical energy which can further be used to optimize the energy balance. This will be realized at pilot-scale. Moreover, the results will be communicated to the public to establish an improved understanding of wastewater as an energy source as well as a resource.

The fluid-structure interaction is well known for biofilm systems describing the interrelation of mass transport and mass transfer in these systems. In microbial fuel cells (MFC) mass transport and transfer are crucial processes that determine their performance (e.g., energy production). Thus, it is important to reliably visualize the biofilm structure which in turn should allow a precise description of mass transport and transfer. The visualization is going to be realized by means of optical coherence tomography (OCT), which allows a representative imaging of the biofilm structure in situ and non-invasively. The structural information will then be transferred to CFD tools (computational fluid dynamics) to optimize the BioBZ microbial fuel cell with respect to reliability, longitivtiy and performance. Finally, BioBZ microbial fuel cells will be installed on a wastewater treatment plant to explore their performance under real operational conditions.