Abstract
With the increasing need to conserve the perishable energy sources many techno-innovative ideas have been looked upon to retain as well as enhance the availability of energy sources. Bioenergy is one such source of renewable energy that concentrates on biological wastes as a source of energy. A plant microbial fuel cell (PMFC) is an advanced form of microbial fuel cell, which uses living plants to generate bioelectricity. Apart from being a renewable source, it is also an in-situ sustainable source of bioenergy. Over the past decade a lot of novel designs have been tried for the PMFCs. The basic design of the PMFC model is that of the sediment PMFC using rice paddy. It was tested in Japan in 2007 which attained a power density of 5.75 mW/m2. Another design is that of a dual chamber plant MFC with common cord grass which was tested by M. Helder et al. in 2009 that achieved 222 mW/m2 power density. A novel tubular design was tested to make it cost effective with reed mannagrass by R. Timmers et al. in 2012 that gained a power density of 60 mW/m2. As such, there are various possible models for different plant species. This article describes the different designs of PMFC with various possible anode and cathode combinations.
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Borker, M., Suchithra, T.V., Srinivas, M., Jayaraj, S. (2017). Sustainable Bioelectricity Generation from Living Plants. In: Patra, J., Vishnuprasad, C., Das, G. (eds) Microbial Biotechnology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6847-8_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6847-8_17
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