| Issue |
E3S Web Conf.
Volume 334, 2022
EFC21 - European Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Piero Lunghi Conference
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 08007 | |
| Number of page(s) | 4 | |
| Section | Microbial & Enzymatic Biolectrochemical Systems | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202233408007 | |
| Published online | 10 January 2022 | |
Towards cost-effective soil microbial fuel cell designs
1 Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Bath, BA2 7AY, Bath, United Kingdom
2 Centre for Biosensors, Bioelectronics and Biodevices, University of Bath, BA2 7AY, Bath, United Kingdom
* Corresponding author: m.di.lorenzo@bath.ac.uk
Soil microbial fuel cell (SMFC) is a carbon-neutral energy harvesting technology that exploits the use of electroactive bacteria naturally present in soil to directly generate electricity from organic compounds. Given the simplicity of the system design, SMFCs have great potential to be used for decentralised solutions, especially in areas where access to conventional energy sources is limited. Yet, the high cost to power ratio severely limits the translation of this technology into the market. With the aim of reducing the capital cost, in this study we explore the effect of decreasing the amounts of current collector (CC) on the performance. The results demonstrate that increasing the amount of current collector per surface area of the electrode is not a feasible way of enhancing power densities, as to increase the performance by 20% and 35%, the amount of current collector would have to be increased by 150% and 300%, respectively. This highlights the importance of economic evaluations when optimising the design of a SMFC.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2022
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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