Electricity From Microbial Fuel Cells

OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY, OREGON, USA. Bioengineers have recently developed a system that can actually produce higher volume of electricity from waste treatment plants using microbial fuel cells. Soon, they will all have a better and more eco-friendly way to treat wastewater and produce electricity at the same time.

This new method was developed to replace the current process that is being used by most waste treatment plants. With the current system, activated sludge is being used to speed up the decomposition process of the solids in waste water. To totally melt down the organic material, microbes are needed to be used. The only problem with this method is that the organic material is turned into methane by anaerobic organisms. Methane is considered as a greenhouse gas and is obviously a great threat to the earth’s atmosphere.

This special fuel cell was developed by Dr. Hong Liu and her colleagues of bioengineers. Instead of using hydrogen or ethanol like what most normal fuel cells are using, the microbial fuel cell uses waste water. This fuel cell can actually produce two kilowatts of pure power per cubic meter of bioreactor volume. That amount is not a very huge amount of energy. However, it is 10 to 50 times more as compared to other microbial fuel cells in the market today.

The next step that the group of bioengineers are looking at is to scale the microbial fuel cell up to commercial use in the near future. Hong Liu says that the pilot study for the power fuel might just be in a food processing plant because it produces a lot of waste water. The only problem that they are considering now is the actual cost to build a high-volume microbial fuel cell. It is very expensive to produce one but they are looking at all possible options they have to make it happen the soonest possible time.