The effect of substrates and anodes on microbial fuel cell performance

In a single chamber microbial fuel cell (MFC), the gas diffusion electrode was employed as cathode. Different organic substrates including starch, glucose and drainage from a hotel were used as fuel to generate electricity. Glucose resulted the best electricity production and the highest COD removal ratio. Nickel foam and carbon cloth were employed as anodes and their effect on MFC performance was discussed. The results indicated that nickel foam could enhance the electricity generation, but suffered an anodic corrosion to form nickel phosphate. The MFC internal resistance was 940 Ω with nickel foam as anode while 640 Ω with carbon cloth as anode. The maximum power output on nickel foam is 190 mW m^-2. The coulomb efficiency reached up to 90%. The possible mechanism was discussed based on the anodes characterization results.