Effects of evolving quality of landfill leachate on microbial fuel cell performance

What is it about?

Microbial fuel cell (MFC) is an innovative technology that could simultaneously treat landfill leachate while producing electrical energy. However, the performance of leachate-fed MFCs, as previously reported, varied and oftentimes below expectation. By feeding the MFCs using leachate from different degradation stages, we discovered that the evolving leachate qualities were playing an important role affecting an MFC’s power density, Coulombic efficiency, etc. The optimal MFC performance was observed when leachate from acidogenesis and acetogenesis was used as the feed.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Our findings show that, when using MFCs to treat landfill leachate, the time to extract the leachate can affect the MFC performance significantly because of the evolving qualities of the leachate. Leachate generated from acidogenesis and acetogenesis stages of solid waste degradation was found to derive optimal MFC performance, which is useful to guide the practical application of MFC for leachate treatment.