Harvest and utilization of chemical energy in wastes by microbial fuel cells
Organic wastes are now increasingly viewed as a resource of energy that can be harvested by suitable biotechnologies. One promising technology is microbial fuel cells (MFC), which can generate electricity from the degradation of organic pollutants. While the environmental benefits of MFC in waste tr...
Saved in:
| Published in | Chemical Society reviews Vol. 45; no. 1; pp. 2847 - 287 |
|---|---|
| Main Authors | , , , |
| Format | Journal Article |
| Language | English |
| Published |
England
21.05.2016
|
| Subjects | |
| Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
| Summary: | Organic wastes are now increasingly viewed as a resource of energy that can be harvested by suitable biotechnologies. One promising technology is microbial fuel cells (MFC), which can generate electricity from the degradation of organic pollutants. While the environmental benefits of MFC in waste treatment have been recognized, their potential as an energy producer is not fully understood. Although progresses in material and engineering have greatly improved the power output from MFC, how to efficiently utilize the MFC's energy in real-world scenario remains a challenge. In this review, fundamental understandings on the energy-generating capacity of MFC from real waste treatment are provided and the challenges and opportunities are discussed. The limiting factors restricting the energy output and impairing the long-term reliability of MFC are also analyzed. Several energy storage and
in situ
utilization strategies for the management of MFC's energy are proposed, and future research needs for real-world application of this approach are explored.
Energy generated from wastes by using MFC technology could be effectively stored and utilized for real-world applications. |
|---|---|
| Bibliography: | Han-Qing Yu is currently a professor in the Department of Chemistry, USTC. He received his PhD from Tongji University, China in 1994. After that, he worked as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, a research fellow at the Nanyang Technological University, and a research assistant professor at the Hong Kong University. He is now an Associate Editor of Water Research and an editorial board member of eight international journals. His research interests include contaminant biodegradation and nanomaterials for environmental application. He has published more than 400 international peer-reviewed papers and 4 invited book chapters. Wen-Wei Li is an associate professor from the Department of Chemistry, the University of Science & Technology of China (USTC). He received his PhD from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2008. After a postdoctoral training at USTC, he joined the faculty at this university in 2010. His research expertise is renewable energy, bioelectrochemistry and environmental biotechnology. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed international papers and 5 invited book chapters. Lin-Feng Zhai received his PhD from Hefei University of Technology, China, in 2007. He now works in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Hefei University of Technology (HFUT) as an associate professor. His research expertise is on renewable energy and environmental electrochemistry. He has published more than 20 papers in peer-reviewed international journals. Min Sun received her PhD from the University of Science & Technology of China (USTC) under the supervision of Professor Han-Qing Yu in 2009. Her research has focused on mechanism elucidation and function exploration of microbial fuel cells (MFC). Dr Sun is currently an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Hefei University of Technology (HFUT), China. She has published over 30 papers in peer-reviewed international journals. ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 |
| ISSN: | 0306-0012 1460-4744 1460-4744 |
| DOI: | 10.1039/c5cs00903k |