Microbial Fuel Cells (MFC) for Energy Production from Wastewater: A Review

Much energy is stored in wastewaters. How efficiently capture this stored energy is of great significance for meeting the worlds energy needs and increasing the sustainable electrical energy from wastewater. The microbial fuel cell (MFC) is a recently developed promising technology for electrical energy recovery from the organic pollutants in wastewaters. MFCs also have great promise for sustainable wastewater treatment. However, at present there is still much research needed before the MFC technique can be practically implemented in the real world. In this review, analyze the opportunities and key challenges for MFCs to achieve sustainability of energy from wastewater. Specially the problems and challenges for scaling up the MFC systems, this is the most critical issue for realizing the practical implementation of this technique. In order to achieve sustainability, MFCs may also be combined with other new techniques to yield high quality of waste from waste water. However, research in this area is still on-going and many problems need to be stable before real-world application. Advances are required in respect of efficiency, economic feasibility, system stability, and reliability.