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Updated: May 11, 2026

Waste Water Derived Electroactive Microbial Biofilms: Growth, Maintenance, and Basic Characterization
Published on: December 29, 2013
Lack of anodic capacitance causes power overshoot in microbial fuel cells
Xinhong Peng1, Han Yu, Hongbing Yu
1MOE Key Laboratory of Pollution Processes and Environmental Criteria, College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Nankai University, No. 94 Weijin Road, Nankai District, Tianjin 300071, China.
Abstract:
Power overshoot commonly makes the performance evaluation of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) inaccurate. Here, three types of carbon with different capacitance (ultracapacitor activated carbon (UAC), plain activated carbon (PAC) and carbon black (CB)) rolled on stainless steel mesh (SSM) as anodes to investigate the relationship between overshoot and anodic capacitance. It was not observed in all cycles of UAC-MFCs (from Cycle 2 to 4) due to the largest abiotic capacitance (Cm(abiotic)) of 2.1F/cm(2), while this phenomenon was eliminated in PAC-MFCs (Cm(abiotic)=1.6 F/cm(2)) from Cycle 3 and in CB-MFCs (Cm(abiotic)=0.5F/cm(2)) from Cycle 4, indicated that the Cm(abiotic) of the anode stored charges and functioned as electron shuttle to overcome the power overshoot. With bacterial colonization, the transient charge storage in biofilm resulted in a 0.1-0.4F/cm(2) increase in total capacitance for anodes, which was the possible reason for the elimination of power overshoot in PAC/CB-MFCs after multi cycle acclimation.
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