Abstract
The quest for sustainable energy sources serves as the essential pillar for development of humans since the dawn of civilization. The alarming increase in demand of energy, especially electricity propelled the need to screen for alternative sources of energy over the conventional fossil based non-renewable counterparts. Electricity generation through microbial route functions by the fundamental phenomena of electron transport chain and the microbes operate as the source of energy production utilizing the substrate. Since its initiation, microbial fuel cell has gained a lot of research focus from all over the world. The integration of waste treatment with power generation was highlighted as the most productive and sustainable part of microbial fuel cells. Over the past few decades, a lot of research and development was done on improving the design of fuel cells, searching for cost-effective electrodes and membranes for commercialization. Despite tremendous research done on this domain, its commercialization still faces a lot of hurdles especially once it comes to the overall maintenance and production cost. This chapter summarizes the basic architecture of different microbial fuel cells and the challenges that need to be addressed for making microbial fuel cells a sustainable route for the bioelectricity generation from microorganisms.
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Umesh, M., Hamza, H.M.C. (2020). Microbial Fuel Cells: The Microbial Route for Bioelectricity. In: Kumar, P., Kuppam, C. (eds) Bioelectrochemical Systems. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6868-8_17
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