Hydrodynamic optimization for design and operating parameters of an innovative continuous flow miniaturized MFC biosensor
Abstract An innovative continuous flow miniaturized MFC based biosensor was developed in this work. The substrate distribution inside sensor channels has important influence in the biofilm uniformity, and consequently in the sensor performance. However, such miniaturized device is too small in dimension to be directly measured. In this work, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was chosen to simulate the diffusion of substrate and its concentration distribution in sensors, with different channel dimensions and various flow rates. CFD results were in good agreement with the experimental data. Results demonstrated that channel length has a significant influence on the stability and sensitivity of MFC based biosensor whilst the detection range was mostly influenced by the channel width. It found that MFC sensor with 10 mm x 10 mm dimension and 50 mL/min flow rate could have the most uniform substrate distribution for 0 492 mg/L BOD. The CFD method developed in this research could also be utilized in the calibration of MFC based sensor.