Microbial Fuel Cells: Performance and Applications
This paper aims to show some applications of microbial fuel cells (MFCs), an energy harvesting technique, as clean
power source to supply low power device for application like wireless sensor network (WSN) for environmental monitoring.
Furthermore, MFC can be used directly as biosensor to analyse parameters like pH and temperature or arranged in form of
cluster devices in order to use as small power plant. An MFC is a bioreactor that converts energy stored in chemical bonds of
organic matter into electrical energy, through a series of reactions catalysed by microorganisms. We have developed a labscale
terrestrial microbial fuel cell (TMFC), based on soil that acts as source of bacteria and flow of nutrient and a lab-scale
waste water microbial fuel cell (WWMFC), where waste water acts as flow of nutrient and bacteria. We performed large series
of tests to exploit the capability as biosensor.