SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project, if successful, will be to advance the development of a novel microbial fuel cell (MFC) system that generates energy from the wastewaters being treated and that could significantly benefit wastewater treatment for a range of key industries. If successfully developed, the company's new MFC technology is expected to offer significant economic/technical advantages for these companies by reducing their disposal costs and waste volumes, reducing the footprint of treatment facilities, and helping them to adopt a more-sustainable process for wastewater treatment. Treatment of organic-rich wastewater is energy-intensive, consuming 15 GigaWatts (GW) or 3% of all electrical power produced in the United States. However, this water contains roughly 17 GW of potential energy. Capturing a portion of this energy through MFC technology would favorably reduce wastewater treatment energy requirements leading to a more economical treatment process. The objectives of this Phase I research project are to demonstrate the scalability of the company's proprietary, low-cost MFC cathode material, its long-term performance, and the feasibility of the company's MFC design to effectively clean beverage wastewater. The need to maintain MFC reactor performance during scale-up and to reduce cathode cost is a major technical challenge for using MFC for wastewater treatment. The successful completion of the proposed research will result in the translation of the laboratory cathode fabrication recipe to a larger-scale manufacturing procedure. Integration of the low-cost cathode material and the unique MFC modular design is expected to provide breakthrough performance and cost that will enable the broad-based economically viable and modular commercial deployment of an MFC wastewater treatment process.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project, if successful, will be to advance the development of a novel microbial fuel cell (MFC) system that generates energy from the wastewater being treated. MFC technology could revolutionize wastewater treatment for small and mid-sized breweries, fruit processors and other food and beverage processing plants. Over 40 billion gallons of wastewater are produced every day by sources such as breweries, juice processors, dairies, and other bottling plants. The company's microbial fuel cell technology is expected to offer significant economic/technical advantages for these companies by reducing their disposal costs, reducing the footprint of treatment facilities, and helping them to adopt a more sustainable process for wastewater treatment. MFC technology also has potential in the low-cost, highly-efficient treatment of municipal wastewater. The objectives of this Phase II research project are to construct and validate the performance of an innovative MFC technology in a scaled-up, simulated commercial-scale system and to validate the technical and economic benefits of utilizing this system to effectively clean brewery and fruit-processing wastewater at volumes representative of commercial operations. Small to mid-size breweries, fruit processers and other food and beverage processing plants are searching for an affordable and effective water-treatment option. A promising approach is microbial fuel cell technology; however, significant technical/economic challenges have prevented commercialization of this technology. During Phase II, the MFC technology will be scaled up and tested at near-commercial scale to demonstrate the same high performance metrics. The cost-effective cathode and separator components and highly efficient reactor design are expected to finally make MFCs practical for wastewater treatment applications.