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Advances in microbial fuel cells for wastewater treatment

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TLDR
In this article, the problems and applications of microbial fuel cells in wastewater treatment were discussed, and the integration of MFCs with other treatment processes was presented to verify the practicality and effectiveness of the MFC in contaminants removal.
Abstract
Resources scarcity and electricity demand have been dramatically increasing. Wastewater is recognized as one of resources for water, energy and plant fertilizing nutrients. Nevertheless, current wastewater treatment technologies have limitations due principally to their energy- and cost-intensive for achieving the conversion target of wastewater recovery. It is desired to develop a new technology to generate alternatives to conventional energy sources in a sustainable manner. An innovative technology based on the use of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) has been proved as a critical pathway for bioconversion processes towards electricity generation, then for addressing energy and environmental problems. Three special features including energy saving, less sludge production and less energy production make MFCs outstanding compared with the existing technologies. Multiform wastewaters could be efficiently degraded through advancing MFCs alone or integrating MFCs with other processing units. However, the low power density and the high operating cost of MFCs have greatly limited their applications on large-scale problems, and then result in some debates and doubts about their development and applications. Therefore, this paper objectively discussed the problems and applications of MFCs in wastewater treatment. Moreover, the integration of MFCs with other treatment processes was presented to verify the practicality and effectiveness of MFCs in contaminants removal. Furthermore, the primary challenges and opportunities for scaling-up and future applications of MFCs in wastewater were analyzed.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Integration of various technology-based approaches for enhancing the performance of microbial fuel cell technology: A review.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the possibility of integration of MFC technology with various technologies of recent times leading to advanced sustainable microbial fuel cell (MFC) technology, including nanotechnology, genetic engineering, additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence, adaptive control and few other hybrid systems integrated with MFCs.
Journal ArticleDOI

Waste valorization using solid-phase microbial fuel cells (SMFCs): Recent trends and status.

TL;DR: The challenges and gaps in SMFC research and development are addressed and the integration of SMFCs with other conventional solid waste treatments could be used to produce sustainable green energy.
Journal ArticleDOI

Application of the eco-friendly bio-anode for ammonium removal and power generation from wastewater in bio-electrochemical systems

TL;DR: In this paper, the potential application of the eco-friendly bioanode material was investigated with the aim of ammonium removal and its recovery, alongside power generation from wastewater in bio-electrochemical systems (BESs).
Journal ArticleDOI

Effects of nitrate and sulfate on the performance and bacterial community structure of membrane-less single-chamber air-cathode microbial fuel cells

TL;DR: The results of this study promote a deeper understanding of the effects of nitrate or sulfate on the ML-SC MFCs' performance and their bacterial community.
Journal ArticleDOI

Life cycle assessment of osmotic microbial fuel cells for simultaneous wastewater treatment and resource recovery

TL;DR: In this paper, an attributional life cycle assessment (LCA) model has been developed to evaluate the cradle-to-grave environmental impacts of the osmotic microbial fuel cell (OsMFC) based on a lab-scale prototype.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Microbial fuel cells: novel biotechnology for energy generation

TL;DR: How bacteria use an anode as an electron acceptor and to what extent they generate electrical output is discussed and the MFC technology is evaluated relative to current alternatives for energy generation.
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Electricity generation using an air-cathode single chamber microbial fuel cell in the presence and absence of a proton exchange membrane.

TL;DR: An analysis based on available anode surface area and maximum bacterial growth rates suggests that mediatorless MFCs may have an upper order-of-magnitude limit in power density of 10(3) mW/m2.
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A state of the art review on microbial fuel cells: A promising technology for wastewater treatment and bioenergy.

TL;DR: A critical review on the recent advances in MFC research with emphases on MFC configurations and performances is presented.
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Conversion of wastes into bioelectricity and chemicals by using microbial electrochemical technologies.

TL;DR: In this paper, the key advances that will enable the use of exoelectrogenic microorganisms to generate biofuels, hydrogen gas, methane, and other valuable inorganic and organic chemicals are reviewed.
Journal ArticleDOI

Production of electricity during wastewater treatment using a single chamber microbial fuel cell.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated here that it is also possible to produce electricity in a MFC from domestic wastewater, while at the same time accomplishing biological wastewater treatment (removal of chemical oxygen demand; COD), which may represent a completely new approach to wastewater treatment.
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