Wastewater Treatment and Concomitant Bioelectricity Production Using Microbial Fuel Cell: Present Aspects, Up-Scaling and Future Inventiveness

摘要

The requirement for a low-cost option for wastewater treatment and simultaneous bioenergy and resource recovery from the wastewater to make treatment sustainable has prompted the researchers to seek innovative technologies. Microbial fuel cell (MFC) is one of the bio-based novel technologies that converts the chemical energy of substrate into electrical energy using electrochemically active bacteria as biocatalyst. With the forefront energy crisis, the MFC has gained widespread popularity due to its capability to harvest direct electricity, while simultaneously treating wastewater. To make this technology scalable, significant efforts and modifications have been attempted by the researchers, including improved design, hybrid concepts, use of low-cost materials for the basic components (electrodes, membrane), establishing innovative low-cost catalysts, identifying several microorganisms as exoelectrogens and methods of pre-treatment of mixed anaerobic sludge to enrich electrogens, etc. This review summarises some of these recent advances pertaining to the MFC and few upscaling applications of MFC. Furthermore, a concise future scope is elaborated in the view of common challenges in the field of MFC for wastewater treatment.