Abiotic, Hybrid, and Biological Electrocatalytic Materials Applied in Microfluidic Fuel Cells: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the work reported in the past decade in the field of microfluidic fuel cells.To develop appropriate research, the most commonly used electrocatalytic materials were considered and a new classification was proposed based on their nature: abiotic, hybrid, or biological. This classification allowed the authors to discern the information collected. In this sense, the types of electrocatalysts used for the oxidation of the most common fuels in different environments, such as glucose, ethanol, methanol, glycerol, and lactate, were presented. There are several phenomena presented in this article. This information gives an overview of where research is heading in the field of materials for electrocatalysis, regardless of the fuel used in the microfluidic fuel cell: the synthesis of abiotic and biological materials to obtain hybrid materials that allow the use of the best properties of each material.

Categorising hybrid material microfluidic devices

“…Prior to the advent of microfluidics as a defined field, micro-sized channels were often contained within components of scientific and engineering instruments mostly unrelated to microfluidic applications (Ren et al, 2013;Convery and Gadegaard, 2019). Currently when compared with early microfluidics, microchannels with various geometries are used for many different applications and have huge potential for use within biomedical science (Ramachandraiah et al, 2017;David et al, 2019;Lu et al, 2019;Pritchard et al, 2019;Guzniczak et al, 2020;Xie et al, 2022), industrial processing (Estrada-Osorio et al, 2024;Jayan et al, 2024;Wang et al, 2024;Yi et al, 2024), environmental research (Hill et al, 2022;AlMashrea et al, 2024;Du and Yang, 2024;Sun et al, 2024) and increasingly reaching into other fields (Apoorva et al, 2024;Lei et al, 2024;Reyes et al, 2024). The manufacturing of these microchannels relies upon the use of appropriate techniques, equipment, and materials to produce microfluidic devices consistently and accurately (Ren et al, 2013;Gale et al, 2018;Scott and Ali, 2021;Akbari et al, 2023).…”