摘要
Enzymatic biofuel cell (EBC) attracts much attention recently in fuel cell community because of its unique feature to enable the enzyme as a catalyst, rather than precious metal, to oxidize the fuel. However, the embedment of carbon nanotubes, commonly used in the anodic electrode of EBC to electrically wire the enzyme, suffers from their complicated synthetic procedure and fragile assembly. In this regard, we demonstrate a facile and low-cost route to achieve a desired immobilization of the glucose oxidase on a robust, flexible conducive carbon cloth. Our result indicates that the EBC using chitosan-modified carbon cloth via tripolyphosphate as anodic electrode exhibits a better performance than that via Nafion, leading to a 53% improvement of area power density. Such an enhancement can be attributed to the formation of the open porous structure on chitosan-modified carbon cloth, beneficial for the immobilization sites of the glucose oxidase and thereby facilitating more electron transfer in glucose oxidation reaction. The self-pumping EBC, driven by a capillary force of micro-fluidic channel plate, delivers an efficient area and volume power density of 0.549 mWcm −2 and 114.52 mWcm −3 , respectively, enabling to open an alternative to the lightweight and portable applications.