New Delhi : Plant-based microbial fuel cells can generate power profitably from wastewater compared to algae-based systems, researchers from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Jodhpur have found.
The results of their work, sponsored by the central government”s Department of Science and Technology, has been recently published in the journal ”Bioresource Technology”.
According to the three-member team, wastewater treatment is an important activity in any civilised society, and the increasing generation of large amounts of domestic wastewater has necessitated development of newer treatment methods that are energy efficient and scalable.
Organic waste material have a lot of latent energy and domestic waste contains nine times more energy than the treatment consumes. There has been interest all over the world to generate energy from waste during the process of waste treatment, the team claimed.
“A Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) is a device that uses microbes to convert organic matter into wastewater directly into electrical energy. While the idea of using microbes to produce electricity was proposed as early as 1911 by Michael Potter, a professor of botany at the University of Durham, its use in fuel cells is a recent development and promises to solve two separate problems — the treatment of waste and energy generation,” said Meenu Chhabra, Associate Professor, IIT Jodhpur.
“In MFCs, live microbes act on the waste organic matter to release the electrons that are extracted with an external load, thereby generating power. Photosynthetic MFCs uses algae or plant to generate oxygen from waste at the cathode of the fuel cell,” she added.
Chhabra, who led the research, explained that algae-based systems have been extensively studied in the recent years because algae grow faster and easily but are sensitive to cultivation conditions. Plant systems are slower to build and have lower efficiencies than algae-based MFCs but are more robust.
“We have experimentally compared the performance of algae and plant-based MFCs under similar operational conditions and wastewater sources,” she said.
The researchers compared the two in terms of pollutant removal efficiency and efficiency of electrical energy generation. They used Canna Indica for plant-based MFC and Chlorella vulgaris for the algae-based MFC. This study was conducted under outdoor conditions using natural wastewater from decentralised wastewater treatment plant of IIT Jodhpur.
“We found that plant MFCs are better suited because they are robust, stable, and achieve high power output. This observation is significant because plant systems are currently underrated because of their low growth rate and large space requirements than micro algae-based systems, but it seems that the power output overrides the above problems.
“Plant-based microbial fuel cells can be easily installed in natural wetland systems for in-situ bioremediation of waste and power generation. Such fuel cells can be easily installed as artificial wetlands at any location where wastewater is collected, and the power generated can be used to power small devices such as LEDs in remote locations,” Chhabra said.