Bio-Fuel Cells:

In this project, the objective is to integrate soft biological components (such as glucose oxidize and other enzymes) and hard carbon based MEMS/NEMS structures into functional advanced power devices-biofuel cells. The proposed biofuel cells will utilize the enzyme glucose oxidase (GOx) to catalyze the oxidation of glucose and the simultaneous generation of electrons; in addition, the efficient immobilization of GOx to yield high energy storage devices will be investigated. The fabrication of the biofuel cell electrode surfaces out of 3D C-MEMS/C-NEMS architectures, which present significantly increased surface area as compared to 2D architectures, will increase the biocatalyst loading considerably, and therefore increase the overall catalytic efficiency and performance of the biofuel cells. Furthermore, utilizing C-MEMS/C-NEMS architectures will enable us to reproducibly fabricate carbon based electrode structures with low-cost and on-chip switchable cell designs.