Simultaneous biohydrogen production and purification in a double-membrane bioreactor system

In this work the establishment of a double-membrane bioreactor was aimed. Initially, a continuous hydrogen fermenter was coupled with a commercial Kubota® microfiltration membrane module and the production performance of the cell-retentive design was evaluated under various hydraulic retention times. As a result, it has been observed that altering HRT influenced the rejection feature of the microfiltration module while had an inverse effect on hydrogen productivity and yield, since shortened HRTs were accompanied by gradually decreasing H2 yields (HY) and progressively increasing volumetric H2 production rates (HPR). The highest HY and HPR were achieved as 1.13 mol H2/mol glucose and 0.24 mol H2/L-d, respectively. Furthermore, a Permselect® (PDMS) gas separation membrane was installed to the anaerobic membrane bioreactor and its ability to separate hydrogen from the raw fermentation gaseous mixture was assessed. The highest purity hydrogen obtained in one-step purification by the PDMS module was 67.3 vol.%, which exceeds 30% enrichment efficiency considering 51.3 vol.% H2 in the feed gas. Hence, it could be concluded that the poly(dimethyl siloxane) membrane has potential to attractively concentrate biohydrogen from fermenter off-gas and may be used for in-situ product recovery.