Friday, August 22, 2008

Microbial fuel cell research blooming

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Everything seems to be going organic these days, from baby food to motherboards. Now, local researchers and entrepreneurs are working to bring definitively inorganic fuel cells into the organic fray.

No fewer than four groups in Massachusetts are racing to bring so-called microbial fuel cells to market through a variety of applications. None has been commercialized yet, but industry insiders say microbial fuel cells hold the potential to become a major part of the renewable energy equation.

Hy-SyEnce Inc. in Fall River, for example, is working to generate large-scale power from the wastewater of food-processing plants, while IntAct Labs LLC in Cambridge is applying its technology to similar industrial applications, as well as the possibility of generating power and recycling waste products during space missions.

A research group out of Harvard University, on the other hand, is hoping to provide power for lighting and other systems in developing nations, while Derek Lovley’s Geobactor Project at UMass Amherst is looking to create organic batteries that could one day power computers or even vehicles.

Microbial fuel cells work on the same premise as traditional fuel cells — a catalyst between an anode and a cathode is stimulated to produce electron flow. But unlike traditional fuel cells that use metal catalysts, such as platinum, MFCs use microbes, which consume organic fuel and generate power. While the premise has been known for decades, the microbes traditionally were engineered in labs. Recent discoveries have uncovered strains of naturally occurring bacteria that can perform the task, and that has brought commercially viable MFCs closer to reality.

“That increases the possibility of commercial applications because you don’t have to introduce genetically engineered microbes into a new environment,” said Peter Girguis, a researcher at Harvard’s Biological Labs. Girguis is leading a group of entrepreneurs working to launch a new MFC company in the coming months.

Don Crookes, founder and CEO of Hy-SyEnce, has been working on his company’s technology for more than two years. The five-person company recently moved to the UMass Dartmouth Advanced Technology Manufacturing Center in Fall River and signed an undisclosed customer in the food and beverage industry. Crookes expects his company to have its first demonstration facility with the customer installed this fall.

“Typically, this has been researched on a laboratory scale, but we’ve innovated in a way that now makes it possible to scale to a commercial level,” said Crookes.

IntAct, on the other hand, has received $75,000 in funding from NASA and $80,000 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture over the past two years. The company’s aerospace applications aim to generate power and remediate pollutants from human waste aboard exploratory missions with large crews. But the company is also making headway in industrial and agricultural wastewater environments. IntAct adviser Korneel Rabaey of the Advanced Water Management Center at the University of Queensland, Australia, has created a demonstration site in that country using brewery wastewater, but the company is also in the process of soliciting venture capital money to launch a more
official pilot facility in 2009, according to CEO Matthew Silver, a former researcher at the MIT Space Systems Lab.

“A lot of people call things ‘platform  technologies’ but in this case it really is,” said Silver. “While we think our applications are the most immediately viable for us, there are a lot of other potential applications out there.”