Boosting the Performance of Microbial Fuel Cells by Combining Effects of Pretreatment and Inoculum Quantity for Tannery Effluent: Modelling and Optimization

ABSTRACT The necessity to create new and alternative technologies for power generation has increased due to the reduction of fossil fuels and rising environmental concerns. Microbial fuel cells (MFCs) offer a sustainable and green approach by decomposing organic matter using microorganisms to provide bioenergy. In this study, a double‐chambered MFC with a Nafion membrane was used to treat tannery effluent. Cow dung was used as the bacterial inoculum and sonication was employed as a pretreatment to enhance the biodegradability of the substrate. Response surface methodology (RSM) was employed to optimize both the inoculum and the sonication duration. The novelty of this work lies in the combined optimization of the inoculum loading and the pretreatment which has not been previously reported for tannery effluent‐based MFC systems. Under optimized conditions (63 g of inoculum load and sonication of 20 min), the system achieved 84% COD removal and a power density of 156 mW/m 2 , along with improved coulombic efficiency (CE), and normalized energy recovery (NER v ). The NER v results of the optimized value are almost 23.43 times higher than those of the control MFC system, proving that the MFC generates more current under optimized operating conditions with pretreatment. These findings demonstrate that synergistic biological enrichment and substrate conditioning significantly enhance electron transfer, and energy recovery.