Electrode material studies and cell voltage characteristics of the in situ water electrolysis performed in a pH-neutral electrolyte in bioelectrochemical systems.

Hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria (HOB) have been shown to be promising micro-organisms for the reduction of carbon dioxide to a wide range of value-added products in bioelectrochemical systems with in situ water electrolysis of the cultivation medium, also known as a hybrid biological-inorganic systems (HBI). However, scaling up of this process requires overcoming the inherent constraints of the low energy efficiency partly associated with the pH-neutral electrolyte with low conductivity. Most of the research in the field is concentrated on the bacterial cultivation, whereas the analysis and evaluation of the electrode material performance have received little attention in the literature so far.