ABSTRACT
Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) that use electroactive microorganisms to directly convert chemical energy stored in organic wastes to electricity offer a sustainable development solution to the ever-growing energy and environmental crisis. Owing to the exclusive properties like high specific surface area with rich pore architecture, diverse element composition, tunable electron structure, high biocompatibility, and renewability, biomass-derived carbon (BDC) materials have been extensively used for MFC anodes. After introducing the fundamentals of MFCs (including the working principle and the interfacial electron transfer pathway of the anode), this chapter summarizes recent advances in the applications of BDCs from various biomass precursors to MFC anodes in three different forms. Particularly, the contributions of various meritorious features of BDCs, such as high specific surface area and hierarchically porous structure, electrical conductivity, surface chemistry, and heteroatom self-doping to improve the bacterial electrocatalysis of MFC anodes are highlighted. Thereafter, current challenges and prospects for developing high-performance BDCs anodes to accelerate MFC commercial applications are discussed.
