Do bacteria reproduce in microbial fuel cell reactors while generating electricity? If yes, how fast and how soon are the reactors getting full, especially as applied to wastewater treatment.
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Specifically regarding bacterial replication kinetics under optimum conditions, published experimental data consistently report doubling periods of just a few hours for many electrochemically-active microbial species.
Extrapolating such exponential growth trajectories mathematically illustrates how initial inocula on the scale of hundreds of cells could plausibly yield populations in the millions after only a few days' operation, even at modest chemical reaction rates.
This has considerable implications for long-term reactor design and management. Without sufficient operating volume or efflux mechanisms to accommodate such prolific biomass accumulation, rapid chamber occlusion and attendant perturbations to fluid flow would seem inevitable.
However, with well-designed hydrodynamics to forestall mass transfer limitations, the inherent advantages of microbial fuel cell processes are amplified. Sustained exponential population expansion serves to maximize catalytic surface area and reaction throughput over time, theoretically scaling power output in a highly favorable manner.
In view of wastewater treatment applications, the self-replicative abilities of exoelectrogenic bacteria may confer additional benefits. As organic loading is converted to electrical current, carbon conversion efficiency increases while pathogenic contaminants are simultaneously biodegraded.
In summary, while unchecked bacterial overgrowth poses technical challenges, harnessing the intrinsic population kinetics of electrochemically-active microbes appears key to optimizing microbial fuel cell performance at both the laboratory and industrial scales
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