Team:NFLS/Implementation
In the future, if we want to use our application in the real life, it will be in the form of a hardware. So, by designing this hardware, our team aims at accomplishing two goals. One is to reduce environmental damage caused by degrading waste cellulose, and the other one is to gain environmentally-friendly energy, which was preciously stored in the cellulose, by utilizing MFC (microbial fuel cell). Once these goals are reached, our team’s program will not only bring great change to our living habitat, but also provide clean potential electric energy to thousands of households.
To realize the practical implementation of our hardware to everyday life, there are some improvements which can be fulfilled in the future. Through our team’s conversation with Professor Yong, we learnt that P. Aeruginosa is a more efficiency engineering bacterium in the MFC. There can be a larger electricity output if we use P .Aeruginosa as the engineering bacteria. In the future, we can also upgrade the P .Aeruginosa to test out whether the survival time affects the amount of electricity production. According to early studies, other components of MFC can be optimized to maximize its efficiency. For instance, we can find a more suitable material for positive and negative poles, and proton exchange membrane to increase electron’s transferring rate and raise the output power.
Besides these, it is necessary to improve the kinetic model we are trying to simulate. Since the concentration of organic substrate largely influences the output power, it is of great importance to have improved kinetic model to help us find the most appropriate concentration.
For safety considerations, we added a kill switch in our system. We used Supernova (BBa_K1491017), which is optimized version of the famous killerRed. This gene can induce superoxide when the bacteria is exposed to light. In this case, Supernova can successfully act as our kill control to ensure our bacteria will be killed as soon as it leaked out the hardware.
Once the hardware is ready to be implemented in the real world, it can bring benefits to many aspects. It can largely reduce the huge amount of waste gas emitted to the atmosphere every year caused by burning waste straw and used paper. By extracting and using the potential biological energy in those materials, our hardware can contribute to environmental protection in a great extent. It will become more convenient for people in all related careers to start making a change. Related companies and factories can be the end users of our device as a better and more environmentally-friendly approach to dispose the waste cellulose, reduce the area of landfill, and restore polluted atmosphere and water sources. Farmworkers can also implement our device in their own farms and lands, which can also help to provide them with clean and fast electricity. It is hard to offer them enough electricity to use with our design today, but we believe in the future the device can be strong enough in electricity-generation and make a great change to all Chinese farmers’ lives.
References
1.游婷. (2017). 铜绿假单胞菌存活时间延长可提高生物燃料电池的产电量. 生物工程学报, 04(v.33;No.220), 68-75.
2. 唐艳. (2014). Mfc利用植物秸秆产电特性研究. 工业安全与环保(12期), 95-98.
