Enhanced Swine Wastewater Treatment by Constructed Wetland-Microbial Fuel Cell Systems

This paper studies the effects of planting plants and coupled microbial fuel cells (MFCs) on the decontamination capacity and purification mechanism of constructed wetlands (CWs). Four systems were set, namely CW-without plants (A1), CW-with plants (A2), CW-MFC-without plants (A3) and CW-MFC-with plants (A4). The daily reductions per unit area of chemical oxygen demand (COD) were 48.72 +/- 5.42, 51.26 +/- 4.10, 53.49 +/- 5.44 and 58.54 +/- 4.16 g.(d.m(2))(-1), respectively. The daily reductions per unit area of nitrogen (N) were 11.89 +/- 0.73, 12.38 +/- 0.76, 12.24 +/- 0.79 and 13.61 +/- 1.07 g.(d.m(2))(-1), respectively. After studying the pollutant removal efficiency, it was found that the unit area of A4 removes the highest number of pollutants, improving the area efficiency of the wetland system and fundamentally alleviating the disadvantage of the large land footprint of wetland processes. The average output voltages of A3 and A4 were 568.29 and 717.46 mV, respectively, and the maximum power densities were 4.59 and 15.87 mW/m(3), respectively. In addition, after high-throughput analysis of microbial samples, anaerobic ammonia oxidising (anammox) bacteria were found to remove N from the system in the anaerobic anode region.

Automated summary

This study investigates the impact of planting plants and coupled microbial fuel cells (MFCs) on the decontamination capacity and purification mechanism of constructed wetlands (CWs). It was found that the combined system of planting plants and MFCs showed the highest pollutant removal efficiency, improving the area efficiency of the wetland system and fundamentally alleviating the disadvantage of large land footprint. High output voltages and power densities were recorded in the systems with MFCs, indicating their potential for enhancing wetland decontamination capacity. Additionally, anaerobic ammonia oxidizing bacteria were identified as key players in nitrogen removal in the system.