International Scientific Journals
of Scientific Technical Union of Mechanical Engineering "Industry 4.0"

Timely detection and treatment of water pollution is of utmost importance for preventing serious environmental pollution and toxicity to living organisms. Traditional monitoring methods require time for sampling and analysis, and those that provide real-time monitoring are expensive and have limited application. The development of a low-cost sensor for real-time water monitoring will enable wider application and quality management of more water bodies. Guided by this, we constructed and tested a prototype of a biosensor based on a sediment microbial fuel cell. The sensor showed high efficiency and sensitivity to the most common heavy metals pollutants from industrial, agricultural and domestic wastewater. The sensor is designed for both portable and desktop applications, as well as for integration into the technological schemes of enterprises for continuous monitoring.

Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) have significant potential for sustainable energy production and waste management, but despite this, they are still not widely commercialized due to several main reasons, such as relatively low power generation, technical challenges, scalability, and others. In the present study, we tested the possibilities for storage and utilization of energy from our developed green waste composter with cogeneration of energy. The composter consists of 24 stacked solid phase microbial fuel cells. The generated energy was increased through a voltage boost converter and used for charging batteries, power banks, and low-energy consumption devices. The composter demonstrated stable operation, and the obtained results regarding the storage and utilization of the energy generated by it are promising for its commercialization.

Nowadays, renewable bioenergy is considered as one of the ways to provide energy at the expense of fossil fuels. The possibility of obtaining energy from organic materials through bio-electrochemical systems attracts considerable interest. Green waste is organic plantbased materials generated from grass clippings, broken branches, fallen trees and others, the utilization of which is currently not very effective. In the present study, we constructed a composter based on bio-electrochemical systems for the utilization of green waste with cogeneration of energy. The composter showed good performance in terms of both the decomposition of organics and the generated energy.