The Effect of Bacterial Adhesion and Electrode Potentials on Electricity Generation of Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs)

The main challenge for MFCs is to thoroughly understand the fundamental mechanisms of electron generation and transfer, and to apply these mechanisms to improve the power generation in the engineering operation. Among other factors, the bacterial activities were believed to be closely related with the performance of MFCs. This study targeted the challenge by extensively investigating the effect of bacterial activities on the power generation and electrochemical characteristics (internal resistances, electrode potentials etc.). The results demonstrated bacterial activities had significant effect on the power generation, the internal resistance and the electrode potentials of MFCs. Anodes with more attached bacteria had higher power generation and lower anode potentials. Although there were signs that Rin was affected by bacterial activities, the correlation remained unclear. Furthermore, different inoculums were also investigated for the power generation. The results showed that the type of inoculums also had a slight effect on the power generation as well as the Coulombic efficiency (CE) and the energy conversion efficiency (ECE) of MFCs.