Renewable Energy Innovations

1Microbial Fuel Cells – A Sustainable Approach to Utilize Industrial Effluents for Electricity Generation

Manisha Verma and Vishal Mishra^*

School of Biochemical Engineering, IIT (BHU), Varanasi, India

Abstract

Microbial fuel cell (MFC) makes an appearance as a fascinating technology for green electricity, and more importantly, it is suitable for simultaneously assisting power generation with wastewater treatment. Recently, major trends follow a technology that fulfills energy demands with minimum waste generation. MFC is a technology which proposed to capitalize on waste as a substrate (industrial effluents, sludge, urea, agricultural waste, etc.) and generate electrical energy. Work done in the area of fuel cells has many configurations and variations based on types of substrate utilized, microorganism associated with electrodes, mediators requirement, and architecture of microbial fuel cell. The most common microbial fuel cells are: two compartments or H-shaped MFC, Single compartment or cube-shaped MFC, Up-flow MFC, Stacked MFC, Sediment MFC in wetlands and their variations. However, as compared to conventional power generation methods, power densities are significantly less in MFC. Therefore, the challenge is to improve MFC efficiency and to reduce the cost of this technology. At the current stage, it is difficult to use them in real-world applications. Efforts are being made to develop a commercial prototype in the coming years.

Keywords: Microbial fuel cells, microorganisms, ...