Microbial electrochemical systems (mess): Promising alternatives for energy sustainability

초록

Over dependence on energy sources of fossil fuel origin to meet the ever-increasing global energy demand not only leads to depletion of nonrenewable energy sources but also results in greenhouse gas emission mediated climatic crisis. Therefore, the renewed research interests in the quest of alternate sources of sustainable and clean energy research are being prioritized in recent times. Microbial electrochemical systems (MESs) are engineered electrochemical systems that facilitate the direct transformation for organic wastes into bioenergy through microbial catalyzed reactions. MESs hold great potential as green bioenergy conversion technologies and related laboratory-scale research have reached unprecedented success in the past 5–10 years. Despite the advantages of this technology, the widespread commercial application of the technology was restrained by limitations of slow microbial kinetics, low efficiency, and high cost. In the last few years, significant advancements have been attempted in the reactor configurations, electrode materials, substrate types, diversity of electrogenic microorganisms, etc., thereby increasing the performance efficiency to several folds. However, further improvements are highly desired for the MESs to be economically viable. This chapter offers an inclusive review of all the recent developments that have been made in MESs emphasizing on bioenergy perspective. In particular, it highlights novel anodes, bio-cathodes, engineered microbes, and xenobiotics of diverse classes that can be exploited for bioenergy production. Besides that, this chapter discusses the scale-up and practical implementation in large-scale settings as pioneering attempts of commercialization. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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