Microbial fuel cell as new technology for bioelectricity generation: A review

Recently, great attentions have been paid to microbial fuel cells (MFCs) due to their mild operating conditions and using variety of biodegradable substrates as fuel. The traditional MFC consisted of anode and cathode compartments but there are single chamber MFCs. Microorganisms actively catabolize substrate, and bioelectricities are generated. MFCs could be utilized as power generator in small devices such as biosensor. Besides the advantages of this technology, it still faces practical barriers such as low power and current density. In the present article different parts of MFC such as anode, cathode and membrane have been reviewed and to overcome the practical challenges in this field some practical options have been suggested. Also, this research review demonstrates the improvement of MFCs with summarization of their advantageous and possible applications in future application. Also, Different key factors affecting bioelectricity generation on MFCs were investigated and these key parameters are fully discussed. (C) 2015 Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).