Sweet Drinks as Fuels for an Alkaline Fuel Cell with Nonprecious Catalysts

Jiao Wang, Xiaohui Zhang, Yang Li, Peng Liu, Xiaochen Chen, Pingping Zhang, Zhiyun Wang and Xianhua Liu
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Jiao Wang: School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300354, China
Xiaohui Zhang: School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300354, China
Yang Li: School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300354, China
Peng Liu: School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300354, China
Xiaochen Chen: Fujian Provincial Engineering Research Center of Rural Waste Recycling Technology, College of Environment and Resources, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350108, China
Pingping Zhang: College of Food Science and Engineering, Tianjin Agricultural University, Tianjin 300384, China
Zhiyun Wang: School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300354, China
Xianhua Liu: School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300354, China

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Sugar has the potential to create enough energy to power mobile electronics. Various sugar-powered fuel cells have been reported, however, most of them used pure glucose as substrate and enzymes/noble metals as catalysts. In this work, an alkaline fuel cell with cheap catalysts were constructed, and different sweet drinks were used as fuels for power generation. The influence of different substrates on the electrochemical performance was characterized under the controlled conditions. Our experimental results showed that the fuel cell fueled with carbonated soft drinks had the best performance under the conditions of 99.95 g/L chemical oxygen demand and 3M KOH. The power densities of the fuel cell fueled with different substrates decreased in the order of Pepsi (33.41 W/m 2 ) > Sprite (28.38 W/m 2 ) > apple juice (20.63 W/m 2 ) > Coca (16.31 W/m 2 ) > pear juice (15.31 W/m 2 ) > orange juice (12.75 W/m 2 ), which was consistent with linear sweep voltammetry (LSV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) analysis. This is the first report on alkaline fuel cell (AFC) performance using different sweet drinks as substrate. These values are more than 10 times higher than those of reported microbial fuel cells. Our findings demonstrated that sweet drinks fueled alkaline fuel cells can be a promising energy source for low-power electronics.

Keywords: carbonated soft drinks; juice drinks; alkaline fuel cell; power density (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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