Enhanced biohydrogen production from corn straw by basalt fiber addition

1. Introduction 
Hydrogen is an attractive energy because of its high calorific value, 
clean and pollution-free, wide range of raw materials. Now, hydrogen 
production technology is developing rapidly, and the current hydrogen 
production methods mainly include fossil fuel reforming, electrolytic of 
water, biological hydrogen production (
Sinha 
& 
Pandey, 2011
). Among 
them, biological hydrogen production is highly praised due to its mild 
reaction conditions, waste reuse and less environmental pollution 
(
Budiman 
& 
Wu, 2018
). To improve biohydrogen production, re-
searches have been carried out from various aspects, such as high- 
efficiency photo-reactors design, excellent strains screening, process 
optimization and introducing additives (
Hu et al., 2017
). 
Introducing additives is one of the hot research directions for bio-
logical hydrogen production, mainly focusing on metal ions (
Li et al., 
2020; Zhang et al., 2021a
), nanoparticles (
Shanmugam et al., 2020; 
Srivastava et al., 2020
) and others (
Liu et al., 2019; Lu et al., 2020b; Lu 
et al., 2019
). Li et al. (2020) reported that Fe
3
O
4 
can promote the energy 
of the substrate converted to H
2. 
Their results showed H
2 
yield increased 
from 159.98 to 190.81 mL with Fe
3
O
4 
dosage from 0 to 100 mg/L. 
Liu 
et al. (2018) 
investigated the effect of SiC/Fe
3
O
4 
Nano-particles on 
hydrogen production by photo-fermentative bacteria. They observed 
that the maximum volume and yield of hydrogen reached 2474 mL/L- 
culture and 3.02 mol/mol-acetate respectively, with the addition of 100 
mg/L SiC/Fe
3
O
4 
nanoparticles. 
Dolly et al. (2015) 
found the hydrogen 
yield increased by 21% with 300 mg/L iron nanoparticles addition 
during photo-fermentation hydrogen production. 
Al-Mohammedawi 
and Znad (2020)
, investigated the effect of Mo
2
+
ions on hydrogen 
production. It was pointed out that when the concentration of Mo
2
+
was 
14 
μ
mol/L, the hydrogen production increased by 27% compared with 
control group. 
Zhang et al. (2021b) 
prepared the NiFe
2
O
4 
nanoparticles 
and studied the effect of them on the biohydrogen production. The 
highest H
2 
yields of 222 mL/g glucose were obtained in the 100 mg/L 
NiFe
2
O
4
, but excess NiFe
2
O
4 
would lowered H
2 
productivity. 
* Corresponding author. 
E-mail address: 
[e-mail] 
(L. Liu).
Contents lists available at 
ScienceDirect 
Bioresource Technology 
journal homepage: 
www.elsevier.com/locate/biortech 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2021.125528 
Received 1 June 2021; Received in revised form 3 July 2021; Accepted 6 July 2021

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Bioresource Technology 338 (2021) 125528
2
These previous researches have demonstrated that introducing ad-
ditives with suitable amount can highly improve biological hydrogen 
production, but most of additives have high cost. Therefore, exploring 
materials with low-cost and high-efficiency is the important focus for 
additives research. Basalt fiber(BF), composing of SiO
2
, Al
2
O
3
, Fe
x
O
y
, 
CaO and other oxides (
Bhat et al., 2018
), is a kind of natural environ-
mental friendly material with low price, widely used in building mate-
rials, road surface engineering, aerospace and other fields (
M R et al., 
2016
). In addition, it was found that BF could increase microbial pro-
duction, immobilize microorganisms, and improve sewage purification 
rate (
Zhang et al., 2018
) 
To the best of our knowledge, BF as additive to enhance bio- 
hydrogen production is investigated here for the first time. In this 
work, the objective was to explore the influence of BF dose and particle 
size on the process of the biohydrogen production from corn straw. 
Moreover, the promotion mechanism of BF addition on photosynthetic 
bacteria growth was analyzed and discussed.