Chapter 2 - Performance Trends and Status of Microbial Fuel Cells

Abstract

With the depletion of natural resources, electrochemical systems like fuel cells show great future potential as power technology for alternative energy sources. One such promising device is the microbial fuel cell (MFC), which extracts bio-electricity from different organic sources used as fuel. Recently, increased attention has been given to microbial electrochemical technology with concomitant electricity production and biodegradation/remediation of a wide variety of substrates. Despite this dual advantage, MFCs still face practical barriers in terms of lower power and current density, restricting them to powering only small-scale devices. However, in the last few years, marked improvements in current densities with ~10,000-fold increments and power densities with less than 1Wm−3 to over 4000Wm−3 have been reported in MFCs. MFCs are a green technology, and present literature addresses the feasible constraints and advantages of different fuel cells with future state-of-the-art applicability of MFCs in the domains of biohydrogen, desalination, and soluble organics production.