The internal resistance, including activation loss internal resistance (AIR), ohmic loss internal resistance (OIR) and concentration loss internal resistance (CIR), is an important parameter that determines the performance of microbial fuel cells (MFCs). The experimental investigations were completed to estimate the contributions of these three components to the internal resistance. The internal resistance is found to vary with electric current, although it is almost a constant for the current is within a certain region. The largest component of the internal resistance is CIR except for small currents. The AIR decreases quickly for small current and reduces its decreasing rate as the current increases and approaches to a constant. The OIR is constant over the whole current range. The experiments also disclose that increasing the limiting current and reducing the concentration loss are both important for improving the MFC performance. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.