Effect of Type and Concentration of Substrate on Power Generation in a Dual Chambered Microbial Fuel Cell

Abstract

Microbial fuel cell, as a new technology for energy generation, has gained a lot of attention in converting a wide range of organic and inorganic substrates to bioelectricity in recent years.Substrate as the fuel of MFCs has an effective role on the performance of MFCs.To investigate the effect of type and concentration of substrate on the MFC performance, glucose and date syrup were examined over a concentration range of 2-20 g.l -1 .Date syrup or any waste of date could be used as a natural substrate while glucose is considered as a synthetic carbon source.In this research a two-rectangular chambered MFC separated by a Nafion 112 proton exchange membrane, was constructed.The anodic compartment was inoculated by saccharomyces cerevisiae as biocatalyst.200 µmol.l - of neutral red as the anodic mediator and 300 µmol.l - of potassium ferricyanide as oxidizer were added to anode and cathode chambers, respectively.The results has shown that 3 g.l - date syrupfed-MFC had the highest power density, 51.95 mW.m -2 (normalized to the geometric area of the anodic membrane, which was 9 cm 2 ), corresponding to a current density of 109.0384mA.m -2 and a MFC voltage of 967 mV.