Abstract:
Hybrid microbial fuel cells integrating different technologies and applications are becoming one of the effective ways to break the power density limitation of microbial fuel cells in recent years. However, the typical hybrid microbial fuel cell technology is complicated to manufacture and limited by various conditions, which is not conducive to its realization for large scale applications. Herein, a three-dimensional iron foam anode coated by nitrogen-doped graphene (N-rGO/IF) was prepared by impregnation and high-temperature reduction, which had a large specific surface area three-dimensional structure. Thanks to the super hydrophilic nature of nitrogen-doped graphene (static water contact angle of 0°), the N-rGO/IF anode has good biocompatibility for high-density microbial loading (1534 μg/cm
2). In addition, based on the iron foam substrate, the galvanic cell is successfully integrated into a microbial fuel cell device to construct a hybrid microbial fuel cell. This hybrid microbial fuel cell is simple to fabricate and has no condition limitations. The electrochemical test results show that this hybrid microbial fuel cell achieves a maximum power density of 0.6019 mW/cm
2 with the enhancement of the galvanic cell (0.3585 mW/cm
2).The results indicate that N-rGO/IF composite anode can be used for the design and fabrication of high-power hybrid microbial fuel cells.