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Microbial Fuel Cell: The Definitive Technological Approach for Valorizing Organic Wastes

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Environment, Energy and Climate Change I

Part of the book series: The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry ((HEC,volume 32))

Abstract

Microbial fuel cells (MFC) are promising bioelectrochemical devices which are currently being developed to harvest energy from wastes. Its state of the art is within a stage of maturity that makes research on this topic ambitious and feasible at the same time, and hence, development of MFC can be considered as research at the edge of knowledge embracing multidisciplinary and the hottest topics of research in chemical engineering: energy, environment, and biotechnology. This chapter describes the fundamentals of the MFC technology and some of its applications, also focusing on the most relevant challenges, which include solving two key problems: cost of comburent and target of applications. Regarding to the first one, a comprehensive review of the main references published during the recent years in algae and natural MFC is presented. Regarding the second, attention is focused on wastewater treatment but other applications are also described. A complete review of the most relevant references on the technology using SCOPUS and WoS is included in the chapter.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support from Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government through projects CTM2013-45612-R and CTQ2013-49748-EXP are gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Castilla La Mancha, Campus Universitario s/n 13071, Ciudad Real, Spain

    F. J. Fernández, J. Lobato, J. Villaseñor, M. A. Rodrigo & P. Cañizares

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  1. F. J. Fernández
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  2. J. Lobato
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  3. J. Villaseñor
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  4. M. A. Rodrigo
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  5. P. Cañizares
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Correspondence to M. A. Rodrigo .

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  1. Department of Physical Chemistry, University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), Ciudad Real, Spain

    Elena Jiménez

  2. Department of Physical Chemistry, University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), Ciudad Real, Spain

    Beatriz Cabañas

  3. CERTES-IUT, The University Paris-Est Créteil, Paris Créteil, France

    Gilles Lefebvre

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Fernández, F.J., Lobato, J., Villaseñor, J., Rodrigo, M.A., Cañizares, P. (2014). Microbial Fuel Cell: The Definitive Technological Approach for Valorizing Organic Wastes. In: Jiménez, E., Cabañas, B., Lefebvre, G. (eds) Environment, Energy and Climate Change I. The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/698_2014_273

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