FuelCellsWorks

Professor Baikun Li and her industrial partners are seeking to harness the energy-production capabilities of microscopic bacteria to produce power and clean wastewater on a large commercial scale.

Li, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering who is also affiliated with the Center for Environmental Sciences & Engineering (CESE), is working with Connecticut-based engineering consulting firm Fuss & O’Neill to develop large-scale, efficient microbial fuel cells.

They have recently received funding for the project from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and New York State Energy Research & Development Authority. Fuss & O’Neill are subcontractors to HydroQual, a New Jersey-based environmental engineering company that serves as the prime contractor.

The grant garnered matching funds from the Water Environment Research Foundation, an international water pollution research and outreach group. The Connecticut Clean Energy Fund has also shown keen interest in the team’s work.

Although they have been studied since the early 1900s, microbial fuel cells are still in their infancy, says Li, noting that most research to date has focused on very small-scale lab units.

In a microbial fuel cell, a feedstock – in this case, carbohydrate-laden wastewater – is fed into a vacuum-sealed cell, where anaerobic bacteria embedded in a carbon tube dine on the fatty acids, glucose, and other organic carbons prevalent in wastewater. The bacteria degrade these organic compounds and generate protons and electrons.

The electrons are transported to an electrode – the anode – and conducted through a copper wire circuit to a second electrode, called a cathode. At the cathode, electrons and protons react with oxygen, generating electricity.

A microbial fuel cell operates at room temperature and requires only wastewater as its influent, in contrast with solid oxide fuel cells and most polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells, which require higher temperatures and pressures, a costly catalyst (often platinum) in the case of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells, and additional hydrogen or nitrogen to operate.

But while solid oxide fuel cells and most polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells are costly to operate in comparison with microbial fuel cells, they are considerably more efficient sources of energy, producing about 3,000 watts per cubic meter of energy, in contrast with the approximately 3 watts per cubic meter a microbial fuel cell may produce.

Li has been collaborating with Fuss & O’Neill since 2007, when UConn engineering alumnus Michael Curtis, senior vice president of the company’s facilities and environmental systems division, foresaw the potential commercial applications of Li’s work.

Fuss & O’Neill has focused increasingly on environmentally sustainable construction and building solutions in recent years, and is involved in the design and construction of dozens of industrial and municipal sewage treatment operations, primarily in the Northeast.

Conventional sewage treatment plants rely on a mixture of processes, including microbes, to produce clean water. In the process, they use huge amounts of power and release tens of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.Curtis says microbial fuel cell technology takes a high-energy resource, such as the carbohydrates in sanitary sewage, and exploits it in energy production. “From a layman’s point of view, it’s like photosynthesis in reverse,” he says.

“A microbial fuel cell takes advantage of the seemingly unlimited supply of wastewater carbohydrates and converts it back into usable energy. The carbon supplying the fuel cell has effectively been sequestered from the atmosphere, making this a green, carbon-neutral process.”

He adds that if the technological challenges to efficiently scaling up the devices can be addressed, microbial fuel cell technology could “turn a trillion dollar industry on its ear.”

The microbial fuel cell under development in Li’s lab uses wastewater as its feedstock. At a small scale, microbial fuel cells can produce a relatively large amount of energy. Their energy conversion capacity declines, however, as the scale is increased, rendering them inefficient power sources currently for most commercial applications.

Li and her colleagues seek to develop high-energy output microbial fuel cells and units suitable for various commercial applications.

In her UConn laboratory, Li has developed 250 ml and 1 liter microbial fuel cell units. With Fuss & O’Neill, she plans to build and test a 20 liter unit, and this summer, to install pilot scale units at a wastewater treatment facility in upstate New York. UConn’s Center for Science and Technology Commercialization has filed a patent application on these new designs.

“Municipal wastewater treatment plants represent a huge energy ‘sink’ in the U.S., consuming an estimated 2 percent to 3 percent of the total power consumed each year across the nation,” says Li.

“Ironically, the wastewater is concentrated with carbohydrates that are inherently high energy compounds. If we could harness this untapped resource to produce high quality energy and clean water, we could reverse the current energy balance of sewage treatment facilities.”

RICHLAND, Wash. – The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will be home to one of 46 new multi-million-dollar Energy Frontier Research Centers announced earlier this week by the White House in conjunction with a speech delivered by President Barack Obama at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.

The EFRCs, which will pursue advanced scientific research on energy, are being established by the DOE’s Office of Science at universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and private firms across the nation.

“As global energy demand grows over this century, there is an urgent need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and imported oil and curtail greenhouse gas emissions,” said Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. “Meeting this challenge will require significant scientific advances. These Centers will mobilize the enormous talents and skills of our nation’s scientific workforce in pursuit of the breakthroughs that are essential to make alternative and renewable energy truly viable as large-scale replacements for fossil fuels.”

The 46 EFRCs, to be funded at $2 to 5 million per year each for a planned initial five-year period, were selected from a pool of some 260 applications received in response to a solicitation issued by the DOE’s Office of Science in 2008. Selection was based on a rigorous merit review process utilizing outside panels composed of scientific experts.

The DOE plans to award $22.5 million over five years for PNNL’s new Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis, which will be led by PNNL chemist Morris Bullock. The Center comprises more than a dozen researchers from PNNL, the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wyoming. The Center is expected to receive $4.5 million in its first year.

“This is fantastic,” said Doug Ray, PNNL associate laboratory director for fundamental and computational sciences. “The Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis will enable a group of outstanding scientists to focus on grand challenges recently identified by the Department of Energy as critical to controlling chemical transformations for energy applications.”

PNNL was also a partner on two other centers – one led by the University of South Carolina on nanomaterials and the other led by the University of Notre Dame on materials containing radioactive elements such as plutonium and uranium. PNNL’s partnership with the UND center will involve the use of equipment at EMSL, DOE’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on the PNNL campus.

EFRC researchers will take advantage of new capabilities in nanotechnology, high-intensity light sources, neutron scattering sources, supercomputing, and other advanced instrumentation, much of it developed with DOE Office of Science support over the past decade, in an effort to lay the scientific groundwork for fundamental advances in solar energy, biofuels, transportation, energy efficiency, electricity storage and transmission, clean coal and carbon capture and sequestration, and nuclear energy.

At PNNL’s Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis, Bullock and colleagues will study molecules called catalysts that convert electrical energy into chemical bonds and back again. Of interest are catalysts that pack energy into bonds involving hydrogen, oxygen or nitrogen. These reactions are at the core of technologies such as solar energy and fuel cells.

For example, a catalyst breaks down chemical bonds to produce electricity in a fuel cell. A fast, efficient catalyst produces more power from fuel than a slow one — and fuel cells for vehicles need to release energy as fast as the explosions in a gasoline engine do.

In previous work, PNNL scientists copied a feature called a “proton relay” from fast and efficient enzyme catalysts found in nature. The proton relay gave their synthetic catalyst speed comparable to natural catalysts. The new Center will help them better understand and control the reactions in such catalysts to make them not just fast, but efficient as well.

“We hope to learn how to apply these principles to design a broader range of catalysts for energy applications,” said Bullock. “This funding will allow us to gain a critical mass of researchers to attack this problem.”

Of the 46 EFRCs selected, 31 are led by universities, 12 by DOE national laboratories, two by nonprofit organizations, and one by a corporate research laboratory. The criterion for providing an EFRC with Recovery Act funding was job creation. The EFRCs chosen for funding under the Recovery Act provide the most employment for postdoctoral associates, graduate students, undergraduates, and technical staff, in keeping with the Recovery Act’s objective to preserve and create jobs and promote economic recovery. However, PNNL’s center will not be funded by the Recovery Act but by regular DOE funds.

Ceramic Fuel Cells Limited (LSE: CFU ) (ASX: CFU), a company that develops solid oxide fuel cell technology and provides low-emission electricity from available natural gas and renewable fuels, disclosed today (1 May) that it received a substantial shareholder notice from KBC Asset Management Ltd yesterday.

KBC’s holding in the company remains the same at 92,500,262 ordinary shares, although its interest has reduced from 12.27% to 8.98% as a result of the recent overseas offer and rights issue.