Abstract
For the past two decades, many successful applications of microbial electrochemical technologies (METs), such as bioenergy generation, environmental monitoring, resource recovery, and platform chemicals production, have been demonstrated. Despite these tremendous potentials, the scaling-up and commercialization of METs are still quite challenging. Depending on target applications, common challenges may include expensive and tedious fabrication processes, prolonged start-up times, complex design requirements and their scalability for large-scale systems. Incorporating the three-dimensional printing (3DP) technologies have recently emerged as an effective and highly promising method for fabricating METs to demonstrate power generation and biosensing at the bench scale. Notably, low-cost and rapid fabrication of complex and miniaturized designs of METs was achieved, which is not feasible using the traditional methods. Utilizing 3DP showed tremendous potentials to aid the optimization of functional large-scale METs, which are essential for scaling-up purposes. Moreover, 3D-printed bioanode could provide rapid start-up in the current generation from METs without any time lags. Despite numerous review articles published on different scientific and applied aspects of METs, as per the authors’ knowledge, no published review articles explicitly highlighted the applicability and potential of 3DP for developing METs. Hence, this review targets to provide a current overview and status of 3DP applications for advancing METs and their future outlook.
Highlights
Microbial electrochemical technologies (METs) are unique platforms that combine microbial metabolism with electrochemistry for various value-added applications (Sravan et al, 2021)
While polymeric materials would be a better choice for keeping the cost low (You et al, 2017), activation or posttreatment would be necessary to achieve desired performance from 3D-printed electrodes (Baran and Erbil, 2019; Pumera, 2019)
It is expected that activation steps will increase the fabrication time and cost
Summary
Microbial electrochemical technologies (METs) are unique platforms that combine microbial metabolism with electrochemistry for various value-added applications (Sravan et al, 2021). Over the last 2 decades, many different applications of METs have been demonstrated: 1) bioenergy generation, such as bio-electricity in microbial fuel cells (MFCs) (Munoz-Cupa et al, 2020; Sravan et al, 2021), bio-hydrogen in microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) (Hua et al, 2019; Rousseau et al, 2020), and bio-methane in MEC assisted anaerobic digesters (Zakaria and Dhar, 2019; Huang et al, 2020); 2) synthesis of platform chemicals, such as hydrogen peroxide (Chung et al, 2020b; Zhao et al, 2021); 3) nutrient recovery (Zou et al, 2017; Barua et al, 2019); 4) water desalination (Al-Mamun et al, 2018; Jafary et al, 2020); 5) biosensors (Do et al, 2020; Chung et al, 2020a); and many more. Studies emphasized the challenges in system design and fabrication, which must be addressed to improve their performance and Component Material/ink Application
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