Development of Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) for Waste water Treatment

Abstract

Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) is a type of renewable technology for electricity generation since it recovers energy from renewable materials that are difficult to dispose of, such as organic wastes and wastewater. MFC are biochemical system in which electricity is produced by oxidizing biodegradable organic matters in presence of either bacteria or enzyme. So the wastewater which contains high levels of easily degradable organic material has gained importance as a source of electricity generation. Microbial production of electricity may become an important form of bio-energy in future because MFCs offer the possibility of extracting electric current from a wide range of soluble or dissolved complex organic wastes and renewable biomass. A large number of substrates have been explored as feed. The aim of this study was to evaluate the electrical generating characteristics of a double chamber microbial fuel cell with pure culture of E.Coli and Primary sludge from ETP with the change of different substrate like Xylose, Acetate, Starch with their different concentration. The performance was analyzed with different substrate concentration like 0.5 gm, 1 gm, 1.5gm. with different microorganism source. The results shows that as the concentration of substrate increases the generation of power density and COD removal capacity increases. The maximum power density generated from these experiments was 55 mW/m2 with acetate as a substrate, 630 mW/m2 with Xylose as a substrate and 310 mW/m2 with starch as a substrate. Also the COD removal from the wastewater was 51% with acetate, 44% with xylose and 51% with starch in 12 hours of treatment.