Electrochemical modeling of microbial fuel cells performance at different operating and structural conditions

Organic matters are directly converted to electricity by microorganisms in microbial fuel cells (MFC). Modeling the performance of MFC sheds light on the behavior of MFC in various operational conditions (e.g. pH and temperature). In the present research, three voltage losses were considered for modeling of the MFC polarization curve. The current research is composed of two parts. In the first part, the polarization curves of various MFCs with different substrates (synthetic wastewater or industrial wastewaters) were reproduced by our model, and model parameters were obtained using experimental data and genetic algorithm optimization. In this part, the electrical performance of 26 systems (12 systems with synthetic wastewater and 14 systems with industrial wastewaters) were modeled with average relative error (ARE) of 17% and a coefficient of determination of 0.9. In the second part, the influence of temperature, pH and hydraulic retention time on the electrical performance of MFC were studied. In this part, parameters were estimated by conventional (estimation of model parameters in each point), and a novel method (estimation of model parameters as a function of operating parameters). It was shown that using second tuning method, the number of estimated parameters decreased, while the error of the model remained at an acceptable level.