Municipal sludge-derived carbon anode with nitrogen- and oxygen-containing functional groups for high-performance microbial fuel cells

Abstract

The demand for efficient and cost-effective anode materials in microbial fuel cells (MFCs) provides the impetus to use carbon derived from solid waste to support bacterial growth and proliferation. Here we show that the municipal sludge-derived carbon (SC) with a porous structure and abundant surface functional groups is effective in improving performance of MFCs. The SC is coated on the 3-D graphite felt (GF) surface by pyrrole electropolymerization in order to increase the surface cites that are interacted with bacteria, resulting in the formation of PPy/SC-modified GF anode. The scanning electron microscopy analysis indicates that the PPy/SC-modified GF can substantially increase anode surface area. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) results suggest that the PPy/SC-modified GF anode possesses higher surface N/C ratio and higher relative contents of OC–NH2 and OC–O functional groups than other counterpart anodes. These characteristics are essential for increasing bacterial attachment to the anode surface, electron-transfer rate and thus anode performance and power performance. The maximum power density resulting from the PPy/SC-modified GF anode was 568.5 mW m−2 (13.6 W m−3) increased by 1.9, 2.7 and 3.5 times as compared to the PPy/AC-modified GF anode, the PPy alone-modified GF anode and the unmodified GF anode, respectively.