Abstract
Biofuel cells use chemical reactions and biological catalysts (enzymes or microorganisms) to produce electrical energy, providing clean and renewable energy. Enzymatic biofuel cells (EBFCs) have promising characteristics and potential applications as an alternative energy source for low-power electronic devices. Over the last decade, researchers have focused on enhancing the electrocatalytic activity of biosystems and on increasing energy generation and electronic conductivity. Self-powered biosensors can use EBFCs while eliminating the need for an external power source. This review details improvements in EBFC and catalyst arrangements that will help to achieve complete substrate oxidation and to increase the number of collected electrons. It also describes how analytical techniques can be employed to follow the intermediates between the enzymes within the enzymatic cascade. We aim to demonstrate how a high-performance self-powered sensor design based on EBFCs developed for ethanol detection can be adapted and implemented in power devices for biosensing applications.
Highlights
Enzymatic biofuel cells have advanced in terms of catalytic activity and energy production rate, but several approaches been proposed to overcome the problems related to Enzymatic biofuel cells havehave advanced in terms of catalytic activity and energy proEBFC
Modified carbon nanotubes have been system able toand increase the bioelectrode surface area, We have shown that the biobattery composed of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs)-COOH/pyrene-TEMPO/
We have shown that the biobattery composed of MWCNT-COOH/pyreneto biosensing applications in the real world
Summary
Cascades on electrode surfaces and on developing methods for the application of enzymes on these surfaces. To increase the degree of fuel oxidation, multiple enzymes have been immobilized employ enzymes tosurfaces collect from biofuels [3,11,16] These systems can oxidize more complex fuels, therebyThese enhanc- enzymes catalyze the ing power density and energy generation [12,20,21]. Ourdegree group has shown that, oxidation, compared to a bi-enzymatic anode, a multi-enzysystem involving six enzymes did not furnish higher power density for ethanol bion electrodematic surfaces [19] These systems can oxidize more complex fuels, thereby enoelectrooxidation [22] because immobilization of the six enzymes on the same matrix limited their functions and culminated in lower bioelectrocatalytic rate [22]. For the theoretical energy (all the electrons) of a fuel to be completely harvested, new methodologies that rely on new materials (e.g., nanostructures, hybrid catalysts, and modified catalysts) integrated with enzymes must be developed [23]
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