Inoculum selection to enhance performance of a microbial fuel cell for electricity generation during wastewater treatment

Experiments were designed to evaluate the influence of various anaerobic inoculums to enhance microbial fuel cell (MFC) performance utilizing tannery wastewater as substrate. Three bacterial electrogenic strains, tolerant to tannery environment, were isolated from soil contaminated with tannery waste and tannery wastewater was inoculated with these monotypes and mixed consortia of three bacterial strains in different MFCs. Comparative analysis was made by treating the tannery wastewater with foreign microbial consortia (activated sludge inoculum) and with only natural habitat microbes already present in plain wastewater. It was observed that inoculum contributes great effect on the MFC performance. Among the studied inoculation strategies, mixed electrogenic strain inocula enabled higher current yield along with concurrent substrate removal efficiency. On the contrary, plain wastewater resulted in relatively low efficiency.