Integrating anaerobic digestion with microbial electrolysis cell for performance enhancement: A review

Anaerobic digestion has been recognized as promising technology for bioenergy production, while the bottlenecks including long start up times, low methane contents, and susceptibility toward environmental change attenuate the process benefits. Integrating microbials electrolysis cell (MEC) with anaerobic digestion (AD) has been recognized as a promising strategy for alleviate the performance bottleneck. This review summarized and updated the current researches that utilize MEC-AD for enhanced methane production from biomass. The integrated AD-MEC was first elucidated, followed by illustrations on strategies for process performance enhancements, parameters effects, and the associated applications. Finally, the challenges and prospects were outlined in this work.