Estudio deviahilidad economica de la implantacion de bioceldas en una planta de tratamiento de aguas residuales

摘要

The juice industry wastewater is characterized by a high organic load concentration, which requires an expensive treatment. Recent investigations propose microbial fuel cells as a wastewater treatment alternative. This article reports an economic assessment of the implementation of 10 microbial fuel cells to deal with wastewaters in a juice industry. The proposed method was compared with the standard activated sludge treatment, where different scenarios were considered. The results show that the investment Net Present Value obtained by the bio cells could provide significant savings around 10 % and 20 % depending whether the scenario was either pessimistic or optimistic, respectively, for a plant lifetime of 15 years. The electrode area considered was set to 0.36 m~2, what resulted in power densities higher than previous results in the literature. In order to verify our results, a sensitivity analysis was carried out by varying the electrode area to 0.5 m~2 and 0.8 m~2. In summary, even for relatively high areas of 0.5 m~2 the Net Present Value was still positive for every scenario and for the area of 0.8 m~2, the optimistic scenario provided positive values. These results corroborate that the wastewater treatment based on microbial fuel cells may provide a profitable alternative with regards to the conventional activated sludge process.