Interdisciplinary Water Resources Seminar
Monday, August 27, 2012, 04:00 PM
Natural Resources Building, Room 109

Interdisciplinary Water Resources Seminar

Speaker: Susan De Long, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Title: Bioelectrochemical Systems: A Technology to Recover Energy and Generate Useful Products from Wastewater

Speaker Bio: Susan De Long is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Colorado State University. Her area of expertise is in environmental biotechnology. She obtained bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in Environmental Science and Molecular and Cell Biology, and subsequently obtained an M.S.E. and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. Her current research focuses on the development and application of nucleic acid-based molecular biology tools to elucidate the microbial ecology of engineered systems. Insights gained can be applied to guide development and optimization of processes including biological waste-to-energy processes (e.g., bioelectrochemical systems and anaerobic digestion), bioremediation processes for groundwater treatment, and biological drinking water treatment processes.

Graduate student speaker: Jeremy Chignel, Chemical and Biological Engineering Topic: “Bioelectrochemical Systems: a Technology to Recover Energy and Generate Useful Products from Wastewater”

Abstract: Industrial, agricultural, and domestic wastewaters contain dissolved organics that require removal before discharge into the environment. The chemical energy inherent in these organics is nine times the energy required to treat the wastewater, yet wastewater treatment still requires 5-7% of all electricity used in the U.S. The main electricity requirement in standard aerobic wastewater treatment is for oxygen addition and agitation; currently the only viable anaerobic wastewater purification technology viable on a commercial scale is methane generation by anaerobic digestion. Bioelectrochemical systems (BES) represent a novel technology for recovery of energy during wastewater treatment. In BES reactors, electrochemically active microorganisms growing on the surface of a conductive anode break down waste organics and transfer electrons to the anode surface. The electrons travel through a circuit to a cathode, thereby generating electricity that can be used to power a device or to generate valuable reduced products (e.g., H2 gas, hydrocarbons, ethanol) at the cathode. While many pure bacterial cultures have been shown to function in BES, undefined mixed consortia of wastewater bacteria generally are preferred, due to their greater power densities and because they do not require that sterile conditions are maintained. While mixed consortium BES can treat a wide variety of substrates, some substrates require certain species to be present in the anode biofilm. The present work demonstrates that augmentation of a mixed consortium BES with certain pure cultures—chosen for their specific functions—can improve overall BES performance on substrates otherwise difficult for the mixed consortium BES to use. The study represents a type of metabolic engineering in which a community of microrganisms is altered to promote a desired function on substrates of interest.

Seminar flyer.

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Event Contact: Reagan Waskom can be reached at (970) 491-6308

Sponsored by the CSU Water Center.