Moreno Piñero, Nicole M.

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    Design, improvement in the construction and analysis of the electrical efficiency of a microbial fuel cell
    (2012) Moreno Piñero, Nicole M.; Vega Olivencia, Carmen A.; College of Arts and Sciences - Sciences; Joubert, Aidalu; López Garriga, Juan; Department of Chemistry; Quiñones Padovani, Carlos E.
    The scientific community is in urgent need to develop instrumentation capable of using alternate energy sources which help to solve the petroleum crisis that world is encountering today. Among the proposed technologies, microbial fuel cells (MFCs) can be a viable alternative to alleviate this problem. MFCs are devices that allow the conversion of organic matter into electricity through the metabolic activity of microorganisms. The MFC design used in our investigation consisted of two glass cylindrical compartments arrange one inside the other and partition with a Nafion proton exchange membrane. The larger cylinder composes the anode compartment with a volume capacity of 250mL of microbial growth media, while the smaller cylinder consist of the cathode compartment which holds a volume of 50mL of 0.1M potassium ferricyanide. Using this setup, the use of bacteria obtained from contaminated soil was investigated including the addition of glucose to the microbial growth media (tryptone and yeast extract media) and the addition of PBS in the cathode compartment. The design was tested with different resistors to evaluate the compliance with Ohm's Law. It was found that the mixed bacterial culture obtained in the contaminated soil belong to the gram negative species with "coccus" and "bacillus" shape, and capable of producing an electric current between 0.35 - 0.36mA and cell voltage 166 - 170 mV using a 470ohm resistor. A 432mC increase in the coulombic output was obtained with the addition of glucose to the protein media and PBS addition in the cathode compartment did not improved MFC performance.