Abstract
Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) harvest electrons from microorganisms in the anode and perform reductive reactions, such as the reduction of oxygen into water, in the cathode. Efficient electron harvesting is important in constructing high-performance MFCs; however, current methods for evaluating Coulombic efficiency (CE) consume large amounts of time, samples, and labors. A rapid quantification method to acquire CE of MFCs is presented in this study. The rapid quantification is accomplished by a laminar flow based microfluidic assay (LF-μAssay), which measures the open circuit voltage differences (ΔOCV) between active and inactivated microorganism samples. The ΔOCV measured by the microfluidic assay and the CE of lab-scale H-type microbial fuel cells were highly correlated. The linear correlation was validated with 3 pure strains of electrogenic microorganisms and applied on the evaluation of the CE of mixed-culture microorganisms with an error less than 0.053%.
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