Development of a Microbial Fuel Cell for Sustainable Wastewater Treatment

This study focused on two objectives to enhance the usefulness of microbial fuel cells (MiFC) as a treatment technology that simultaneously allows for energy recovery. Those objectives were to: 1) use nitrifying cultures to capture energy associated with ammonia and other reduced nitrogen chemicals found in wastewaters, and 2) determine whether the addition of carbon nanostructures to stainless steel anodes in anaerobic microbial fuel cells enhanced electricity generation. The report provides an introduction to MiFCs, a review of current MiFC literature, a description of the procedures used to fabricate and characterize nanostructured anodes and MiFC performance, and a discussion of the results comparing the performance of nanostructured and stainless steel MiFC anodes. Published by WERF. 66 pages. Soft cover and online PDF. (2010)

Originally funded as WERF project U1R06.