Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
All these efforts have opened up new opportunities for improving power
generation of MFCs. However, we still have no clear idea about the detailed
interactions between the physical and chemical factors and the microbial proper-
ties. Indeed, one of the biggest barriers in the road of advancing MFC technology
is our lack of understanding on the ecology of the microbial communities that
produce and transfer electricity and their interactions with the external environ-
ment. This is exactly where the greatest uncertainty in MFC design lies. Therefore,
one of our first tasks is to get a deeper understanding of such processes so that we
can have a better handle on microbial behavior regulation by applying appropriate
enhancement
techniques.
Meanwhile,
more
efficient
and
economically-viable
approaches for MFC enhancement are still to be pursued.
3 Extended Applications
MFCs were originally designed to produce power from organic matters under
bacterial catalysis, but there has been a rapid evolution in these systems in recent
years, resulting in a variety of possibilities for extended applications. In the light
of the many remaining limitations to further improvement of power output and
scale-up, some researchers have argued that the greatest value of MFC technology
may not be the production of electricity but the ability to efficiently degrade wastes
and recover valuable products [
74
,
75
]; this may open up new fields of MFC
application.
3.1 Enhanced Wastewater Treatment
One of the most promising directions of practical MFC application is for waste-
water treatment and bioremediation [
76
]. MFCs for wastewater treatment show
several obvious advantages compared with conventional biological treatment
processes, such as very low sludge production, high capability to remove a wide
range of refractory organics and other contaminants, energy generation, and
possible low cost because the power output from MFCs may ultimately
compensate for part of the energy consumption [
74
]. Indeed, there are already
some successes in implementing MFCs for enhanced wastewater treatment and
bioremediation in real-world scenarios, but mostly at small scales.
3.1.1 Refractory Substance Degradation
Success in using various readily degradable organics, such as glucose, acetate and
sucrose, to fuel MFCs has been intensively documented [
77
], while the exploration
of MFCs for degradation of bio-refractory substance is at the very beginning.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search