Flexible Paper-Based Biofuel Cells Fabricated By Screen-Printing

Biofuel cells (BFCs) are energy conversion systems that produce electricity from biological resources such as sugars and alcohols with the aid of specific enzymes.^1-3 More recently, flexible, light, and thin BFC devices based on printing technologies have attracted increasing attention to address these drawbacks.^4-8

Screen-printing technique has been widely applied to fabrication of electrochemical devices such as dye-sensitized solar cells⁹, biosensors^10-13 and corrosion sensor¹⁴ since it has following merits: (a) drawing precise pattern of mm order, (b) a wide variety of inks, (c) high reproducibility, and (d) low cost. Recetnly, we fabricated a fully screen-printed paper-based chromatographic biosensor chip for glucose detection¹⁴.

In this study, we prepared several screen-printed paper-based biofuel cell with different stuctures and investigated its characteristics. In this abstract, we introduced a  paper-based BFC.¹⁵

The BFC is composed of bioanode and biocathode components in which porous carbon electrodes were built using porous carbon inks. The present BFC functions by soaking the bottom of the printed-paper in electrolyte solution to spread the electrolyte solution throughout the paper. We found a Japanese paper to be a suitable printable substrate since the Japanese paper has high water absorbency.

 Electrochemical response of the BFC was examined The open circuit potential was 0.55 V, which is attributed to the difference of the onset potentials of the bioanode and biocathode. The maximum power density was 0.12 mW cm⁻² at 0.4 V.

 In the present study, we improved the power density by changing in the anode and cathode materials and stracture of the BFC.

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