earticle

영어

Microbial fuel cell (MFC) devices offer a great potential for both the treatment and the recovery of energy from a wide range of waste water types. Substrate type is an important factor in MFC operation and this means that strategies to enrich the anodic biofilms can be utilized to enhance reactor performance. DGGE community profiling techniques demonstrated that electrogenic biofilms were enriched according to the type of substrate fed into the system. Power density analysis showed that acetate produced a power of 7.2 W m-3 and butyrate a power 0.29 W m-3. However it was also demonstrated though substrate-switch testing that the substrate acclimation environment also determined how the MFC/anodic biofim responded to subsequent substrate types, as when a sucrose acclimated anodic biofilm was fed with acetate and butyrate substrates this produced power densities of 1.07 and 1.0 W m-3 respectively. Changes in temperature were used to investigate the stability of these different substrate acclimated biofilms. This investigation showed that a 20oC acclimated acetate reactor was not affected by operation at 10oC but operation at 35oC did adversely affect all the reactor types. It is thought that the level and type of syntrophic interactions within the anodic biofilms will be determined by the complexity of the substrate and this will then determine the robustness of the biofilm to perturbation events.