Research Summaries

Back Materials Compatibility and Wiring Schemes for Microfluidic Microbial Biofuel Cells

Fiscal Year 2021
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Physics
Investigator(s) Kartalov, Emil P.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary The Navy's 30-year R&D plan heavily emphasizes fleets of drones, e.g. underwater unmanned vehicles (UUV). Such fleets have many advantages but are currently limited by short operational ranges, which pose a logistics problem of recharging the UUVs locally and frequently. One of the ways to solve this problem is distributed networks of local renewable power sources. Biofuel cells based on benthic bacteria offer one such solution. We have developed a microfluidic microbial biofuel cell (uFMBC), which produces 4x the power output density of traditional macroscale microbial biofuel cells. It is a two-dimensional prototype that must be further developed in multiple directions, so that is serves as the building block of deployable power stations. The proposed projects will develop two such aspects - materials biocompatibility and inbuilt wiring in 3D-printed chips
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Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal