Thaindian News

Sydney, December 16 (ANI): Scientists in India and the United States are using microbes to turn the sugar and vinegar resulting from improper fermentation into electricity and hydrogen, thus showing that bad wine can be converted into good energy.

According to a report in ABC Science, the technology could provide a new and cost effective way to clean wastewater from wineries and get some value out of a bad bottle of wine.

“There is nothing special about the bacteria,” said Bruce Logan, a scientist at Penn State University who recently installed a microbial electrolysis cell at a winery in Napa Valley, California.

“We just give them a good environment to grow in,” he added.

It takes a lot of water to grow, harvest, process and ferment the sugar in grapes into the alcohol that is bottled up.

All that wastewater, loaded with unfermented sugar, improperly fermented vinegar, biomass and other contaminants, has to be cleaned, and cleaning wastewater is expensive.

According to Logan’s estimates, about 1.5 percent of all the electricity in the US goes into wastewater treatment.

Up to 5 percent of all the country’s electricity goes into the nation’s water management systems.

The winery in the study doesn’t have specific statistics on how much they pay to treat their wastewater, but it is expensive.

To offset the cost of treatment, its owners installed a 1000-litre, refrigerator-sized microbial electrolysis cell to help treat some of the wastewater.

Until this point, Logan’s microbial fuel and electrolysis cells have been smaller than a teakettle.

While Logan uses a microbial electrolysis cell to split water, a group of scientists from India recently developed a microbial fuel cell that uses wine to produce energy.

“Sugars like glucose, alcohols and effluents containing sugars or alcohols can be used (to produce electricity),” said Professor Sheela Berchmans of the Central Electrochemical Research Institute in India.

Two different bacteria can spoil wine, Acetobacter aceti and Bluconobacter roseus.

The scientists from India created microbial fuel cells using single cultures of each bacteria as well as both together.

A fuel cell with A. aceti or B. roseus produced a mild electrical current, about 213 milliwatts for the former and 395 milliwatts for the latter.

Put them together, however, and the combination can generate 859 milliwatts of power.

“The mixture of the cell cultures improves metabolic degradation,” said Berchmans.

The scientists hope that the technology could eventually be scaled up to produce more electricity or help to save electricity that would normally be used to treat wastewater. (ANI)