Construction and application of a 1-liter upflow-stacked microbial desalination cell

As increasing demand of global reuse water, microbial desalination cell (MDC) is developed as a potential desalination approach to drive ion migration and separation through biodegradation without any additional energy. A novel, efficient, stable reactor coupled stacked MDC with upflow MDC was constructed, which was named as upflow-stacked MDC (USMDC). Compared with the traditional stacked MDC and upflow MDC, the desalination and generation performance of the USMDC was evaluated. Results showed that, after 24 h, the desalination ratio of USMDC can reach 91.9% when the external resistance was 1.5 Ω, which was 1.18 and 1.48 times higher than SMDC and UMDC, respectively. The long-term performance of the desalination efficiency was tested, which was maintained at 87.2–96.0% and stable for consecutive 120 days. Then, it was also the investigated that the relationship between desalination rate and external resistance during every period. The USMDC produced a maximum power density of 32.91 W m−3. In addition, the difference of current density between USMDC and SMDC indicates the turbulence generated by cylindrical structure could effectively decrease the internal resistance. It was also corroborated that salt concentration gradient and bipolar electrodialysis would decline the charge transfer efficiency. Accordingly, USMDC was verified having the superior desalination performance thus providing the possibility for application in wastewater reuse. [Display omitted] •The desalination performance of USMDC was greatly improved, which was nearly 1.5 times that of UMDC of the same volume.•The desalination effect was fairly stable between 87.2% and 96.0% for consecutive 120 days.•USMDC has nearly twice the charge transfer efficiency compared with UMDC.•Both salt concentration gradient and bipolar electrodialysis would influence the charge transfer efficiency.