(Digital Presentation) Microbial Fuel Cells: Electrochemical Property and Long-Term Stability Improvement

The microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are bioelectrochemical devices to convert chemical energy into electricity using a microorganism, without relying on abiotic catalysts and fossil fuels. The microbes enable proton production and electron transfer by oxidizing organic matters, which can be from wastewater, biomass, and other feedstocks. The electrons flow will produce a direct electrical current, causing the potential differences between the anode and cathode compartments. The aromatic sulfonation of membrane may result in acidity changes in the anode, causing microbe inhibitions. The PVA based novel membrane was developed and used as the electrolyte to overcome the above problems. The brewer’s yeast (S. cerevisiae) as a biocatalyst was used in MFCs due to the resilience to environmental changes and simple mechanism of electron transfer. The S. cerevisiae an eukaryote was found to easily retrofit into ethanol plants for in situ power generation, which were found improve the microbial fuel cell performance by our study. This study indicated that anodic biofilm modification using nanoparticles is an effective approach to improve electrochemical activities due to their high surface area and high electronic conductivity. The red-light facilitates the efficient electron transfer through mediated redox couples within the anodic biota-anchored films. These redox mediators may represent an electronic network permeating the biofilm that can promote long-range electrical transfer in an energy-efficient manner, as a result of increasing MFC electricity production. As society migrates from consumption of gasoline to low carbon-based fuels, the MFCs becomes important to produce electrical energy with near zero net emission. Figure 1