Towards monolithically printed Mfcs: Development of a 3d-printable membrane electrode assembly (mea)

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (3D-printing) and microbial fuel cells (MFCs) are two rapidly growing technologies which have been previously combined to advance the development of the latter. In the same line of work, this paper reports on the fabrication of novel membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) using materials that can be 3D printed or extruded from the EvoBot platform. Materials such as air dry terracotta, air dry Fimo™ and standard terracotta were tested against conventional cation exchange membrane (CEM) material. The MEA was fabricated by painting the materials with custom made graphite coating. The results showed that the MFCs with the printable materials outperformed those using conventional CEM. Economic analysis showed that the utilization of ceramics-based separator can reduce significantly the overall costs. These findings suggest that monolithically printed MFCs may be feasible, as printable MEAs can improve MFCs performance, and help realise mass manufacturing at lower cost.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Ioannis Ieropoulos: orcid.org/0000-0002-9641-5504

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