Applications

Current Applications

wastewater treatment

Figure1: description

Full-scale, effective MFC’s for wastewater treatment could generate constant amounts of power from a rather “free” substrate. Those cells could be implemented at suitable industrial locations, where reliable, substrate-rich effluents are present. Wastewater from food processing plants or digester effluents should be named here. Calculations show that a ten-year payback of the required investments can be achieved for a plant producing 7.5 t waste organics per day (Logan et al., 2006). For the long term, electricity production from domestic sewage could also be made accessible through MFC’s. Currently, energy is invested to treat domestic wastewater, which contains approximately 9.3 times as much as the treatment energy itself (Logan and Regan, 2006). The usage of this contained energy could prospectively lead to a net excess of energy, where energy input is required at present. As promising as those applications might sound, a scale-up of efficient MFC’s is currently not quite within reach. Material issues and cost-effectiveness are the key obstacles that need to be overcome by future research. Also, most of the present low-scale designs for MFC’s cannot be scaled up to turn into large wastewater treatment plants.

Future Applications

References