Effect of internal and external resistances on desalination in microbial desalination cell

The Green and cost-effective nature of microbial desalination cell (MDC) make it a promising alternative for future sustainable desalination. However, MDC suffers from a low desalination rate to be commercialized. External resistance (R-ext) is one of the factors that significantly affect the desalination rate in MDCs, which is yet under debate. This research, for the first time, investigated the impact of R-ext on MDCs having different internal resistance (R-int) of the system to discover the optimal range of R-ext for efficient MDC performance. The results showed that the effect of R-ext on desalination rate (2.52 mg/h) was quite low when R-int of MDC was high (200 Omega). However, operating MDC with low R-int (67 Omega) significantly improved the desalination rate (9.85 mg/h) and current generation. When MDC was operated with low R-int the effect of variable Rext on desalination and current generation was noticeable. Therefore, low R-int (67 Omega) MDC was used to select optimum R-ext when the optimal range was found as R-ext