Using Chicken Manure as a Source of Multi-Functionalities to Catalyse Oxygen Reduction Reaction in Clean Energy Devices

Abstract Chicken manure is one of the most widely generated animal waste worldwide. However, waste is the anomaly being used for this organic treasure as it contains all 13 essential nutrients that are used by plants and for the reason, the traditional use of chicken manure is as a fertilizer. It increases the fertility of soil but at the same time, it may give rise to accumulation of heavy metals in soil, greenhouse gas emissions, soil acidification, spreading of diseases, rodents, and pests, etc. Other value-addition processes for the treatment of chicken manure like composting, gasification, pyrolysis, torrefaction, etc., are either costlier or energy intensive. So, we present here a new method to use chicken manure in a very simple and economical way for the fuel cell applications. In this study, carbon nanofibers (CNF) are modified with chicken manure to impart multiple functionalities to their surface, and further the functionalized CNF are explored as an electrocatalyst to speed up the sluggish oxygen reduction reaction kinetics happening at the cathode of a fuel cell. The functionalized CNF contains N (7.40 at.%), O (6.22 at.%), P (0.30 at.%), S (0.02 at.%), etc., elements as revealed by the EDX and FTIR studies. FESEM and XRD studies confirmed that the morphology of CNF remained intact after their treatment with chicken manure. The modified CNF exhibited a higher electrocatalytic activity (onset potential: - 0.0756 V; limiting current density: 2.69 mA cm -2 ) as compared to the pristine CNF. The effects of dispersion (with Triton X-100) on the chicken manure-based functionalization of CNF are also investigated. This preliminary study on novel usage of chicken manure for the fuel cell applications will usher the advanced ways of treating different environmental wastes.