Let's Make Microbial Fuel Cells (aka Bacterial Batteries)

Please bring a $10 donation if you are able to help pay for materials.

If you need to get a hold of me on Sunday you can reach me at 503-489-8604

Originally I was thinking we could squeeze in a general meeting before making the MFCs. There are a few topics I think are worth discussing, but I would rather put them off until next week and focus instead on getting everything rolling smoothly with our MFCs. Mitch and I will be working on a class so everyone can understand how these bacterial batteries work. On Thursday a few of us are going to collect some mud, but feel free to bring your own mud too. It would be interesting to see what "mud habitats" yield better batteries. If you want to bring a your own mud you'll need about a gallon. If you can try and take a picture of it and mark where you got it from on Google maps. We can find the good mud veins!

Note: we only have enough material for about 8 cells so if a lot of people are interested hopefully people won't mind sharing. Here's the agenda I'm thinking:

First hour:

BioBasics: Introduction to MFCs class After Class:

Start making the MFCs Tinker with arduino, microcontrollers, etc and see if we can steamdata from our MFCs online. Have fun! About the MFCs

Basically here's the jist: geobacter and some other anaerobic organisms are able to use metal oxides as their final electron acceptor. What does that mean? Ok, so a lot of organisms, people for example, create energy by shifting electrons from a energy molecule like glucose (surgar) towards oxygen - the final electron acceptor. Geobacter, however, does not usually have oxygen available so it uses metal oxides (ie rust) as its final electron acceptor. This means you can create a battery from mud containing various anaerobic organisms, like geobacter. These organisms will deposit electrons on an electrode which will create a voltage difference between a cathode and anode (ie a battery).

You can find out more here: http://blog.makezine.com/projects/bacteria-battery/

If you want to read a bit more about microbial fuel cells here's a great article from ScienceDaily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120710133100.htm

Sound interesting? Then RSVP and lets make some microbial fuel cells!