Abstract
Renewable and green energy resources are paramount to environmental sustainability. Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are potential candidates for these alternatives but there is need to search for cheaper fuels to drive the MFCs for realistic large scale applications. A high strength effluent such as whey, which poses a serious environmental threat, is a good candidate for fueling the MFCs with an added advantage of bioremediation. Thus, cheese whey was evaluated for its ability to drive MFCs and the extent of whey remediation was also investigated during the operation of MFCs in this study. Three experimental anodic setups: Raw (unamended) whey alone, heat treated (sterile) whey inoculated with Enterobacter cloacae subspecies dissolvens , and raw whey inoculated with E. cloacae where employed. Native whey microbes achieved 44.7 ± 0 .2% total chemical oxygen demand (tCOD) removal efficiency and 0.04% coulombic efficiency (e cb ). The maximum power density generated was 0.4 W/m 2 (normalized to the anode surface area). Upon introduction of an exogenous electricigenic E. cloacae culture in the whey, the tCOD removal efficiency dropped to 5% while e cb was the highest (3.7%) with maximum power density of 16.7 ± 1.8 W/m 2 . However, a combination of E. cloacae and unsterilized/unamended whey gave 1.1 W/m 2 , e cb of 0.5% and 22.1% tCOD removal. The results confirmed the ability of whey to be used as a fuel in the anodic chamber to drive electricity generation in an MFC system with its partial remediation, but absence of synergism between E. cloacae and the electricigens is inherent to whey. Keywords : Microbial fuel cell, cheese whey, coulombic efficiency, bioremediation, sustainable energy, electricigen
Highlights
The need for alternative energy sources to fulfil the environmental friendliness goals in energy production and substitute the depleting fossil fuel reserves has seen active research and a variety of potential alternatives
Sterile whey inoculated with E. cloacae produced maximum power density of 16.7 ± 1.8 W/m2 (Figure 2)
Results from this study established that, whey can drive power generation in Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) with variations in power density based on the microbial composition in the anode chamber
Summary
The need for alternative energy sources to fulfil the environmental friendliness goals in energy production and substitute the depleting fossil fuel reserves has seen active research and a variety of potential alternatives. MFCs take advantage of the oxidation of organic compounds to produce electricity Their advantages include combining bioremediation and electricity production, their environmental friendliness and ability to be used in remote areas. The wide scale application and realistic scaling up of MFC to significantly substitute current fossil fuel energy generation techniques remain elusive. This is because of the requirement of large area of operation for meaningful power production, low power output due to internal resistances, poor reproducibility of the setups and expensive artificial/defined media for the anode chamber (Logan and Regan, 2006 a, b; Liu and Li, 2007). The biology of microbial consortia involved is yet to be fully understood (Bullen et al, 2006)
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