ABSTRACT
Water scarcity and electricity demand continue to dramatically increase. Wastewater is seen as a potential resource for water, energy, and nutrients. Due to high energy consumption, current wastewater treatment technologies are cost intensive. Therefore, there is a need to develop new wastewater treatment technologies that can generate energy during wastewater treatment. Recently, microbial fuel cells have gained considerable attention from researchers as an alternative energy conversion system for generating bioenergy and treating wastewater simultaneously. Microbial fuel cell technology is based on bioelectrochemical principles, which can provide tremendous benefits over conventional treatment systems like energy generation with concurrent wastewater treatment, nutrients recovery, energy saving, reduced sludge generation, and energy conversion. However, large-scale applications are limited due to the low power density and the high operating costs. Therefore, this chapter comprehensively discusses the principles, features, types, materials used, microbiology, operation, and application of microbial fuel cells. This review also discusses the primary challenges and opportunities for the future applications of microbial fuel cells.
