Abstract—Electricity generation from microbial fuel cell (MFC) can be enhanced by proper manifestation of electrogenic bacterial growth on anode surface. Effect of graphene oxide (GO)/ Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) composite bio-anode and
Chaetoceros pre-treated anodic inoculum on electricity generation in MFC was investigated in the present work. MFC using GO/PTFE composite bio-anode demonstrated a maximum power density of 20.52 W/m3; whereas, MFC using bare carbon felt anode without modification produced a maximum power density of 10.25 W/m3 and this was 3.43 W/m3 for MFC using carbon felt anode inoculated with mixed anaerobic sludge without pre-treatment. Coulombic efficiency (CE) of 41.82 % was obtained in MFC with modified bio-anode using Chaetoceros algae pre-treated mixed anaerobic sludge as anodic inoculum. This CE obtained is far superior than the values reported earlier using mixed anaerobic sludge as inoculum. Increased catalytic current and lower charge transfer resistance were observed during linear sweep voltammetry (LSV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) for MFC with GO/PTFE modified anode as compared to MFC using unmodified anode. Thus, GO/PTFE modified carbon felt anode with Chaetoceros pre-treated mixed anaerobic sludge as inoculum could be used in MFC to enhance the power harvested by this device while simultaneously offering effective treatment to wastewater.
Index Terms—
Chaetoceros, coulombic efficiency, graphene oxide, microbial fuel cell, suppressing methanogenesis.
The authors are with the Indian Institite of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur – 721302, India (e-mail: rajsone86@gmail.com, noori.iitkgp@gmail.com, ghangrekar@civil.iitkgp.ernet.in).
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Cite:P. P. Rajesh, Md. T. Noori, and M. M. Ghangrekar, "Graphene Oxide/Polytetrafluoroethylene Composite Anode and Chaetoceros pre-Treated Anodic Inoculum Enhancing Performance of Microbial Fuel Cell," Journal of Clean Energy Technologies vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 236-241, 2018.
