August 21st, 2006
The US produces Bioethanol from corn. Right now, people are looking at Cellulosic ethanol production, which will make use corn waste to produce the biofuel. Researchers from Penn State and led by Dr. Bruce E. Logan of Environmental Engineering believes that electricity can be produced using corn sugars directly.
The process involves microbial fuel cells to convert organic material into electricity. There are currently numerous ongoing research on microbial fuel cells and this study is one of them. With a potential 250 million metric tons of available corn waste material per year in the US, a tremendous amount of electricity can be generated by simply collecting these materials and feeding them to microbial fuel cells.
The process converts all the available energy to electricity. At a production rate of one watt per square meter area at 0.5 volts, this process can be linked, similar to a serial connection of batteries, to produce significant amounts of energy.
The possible applications of microbial fuel cells that are based on corn wastes are endless. For the rural communities where wastes are available, a variety of uses can easily be imagined including power for irrigation, rudimentary lighting for off-grid areas, and processing of corn such as shelling and drying.