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The major technical obstacles in commercialization of microbial fuel cell technology are the sluggish kinetic, high cost, and poor durability of an air cathode electrocatalyst. This research aimed to synthesize the highly active, stable and low cost non-precious metal catalyst to replace the expensive Pt electrocatalyst using a simple, low cost and scalable method. The Fe3C and Fe-N-C catalysts were prepared by direct heating the precursors under autogenic pressure conditions. X-ray diffraction pattern revealed the phase of Fe3C sample was cohenite Fe3C and graphitic carbon, while the phase of Fe-N-C catalyst was only graphitic carbon. The morphology of the synthesized catalysts was a highly porous structure with nanoparticle morphology. The surface area of the Fe3C and the Fe-N-C catalysts was 295 and 377 m2 g-1, respectively. The oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) activity of Fe-N-C catalyst was more active than Fe3C catalyst. The ORR performance of Fe-N-C catalyst exhibited about 1.6 times more superior to that of the noble Pt/C catalyst. In addition, the Fe-N-C catalyst was durable to operate under neutral media. Thus, a novel autogenic pressure technique was a promising method to effectively prepare an highly active and durable non-precious metal catalyst to replace the precious Pt/C catalyst.

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The objective of this research is to present results of the performance (torque, power, thermal efficiency and specific fuel consumption) in a heavy-duty diesel engine when fueled with diesel-waste plastic pyrolysis oil (WPO) blends in full load condition. The tested engine is installed on an engine test bench and is attached with several sensors. The full factorial experimental design is performed to investigate both main and interaction effects. It is shown that fuel blends, engine speed and interaction of both factors significantly affect all engine performance parameters. The functional relationships between parameters are developed by second-order quadratic models. The result shows that the mathematical models are able to predict the performance characteristic with mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) in the range of 1.614 to 2.987%. The increase of mixing ratio to WPO 75% greatly decreases engine output torque and power approximately by 23.79%. Consequently, thermal efficiency can be reduced by 5.97% while specific fuel consumption can be increased by 31.22%. The results of error analyses, the graphical presentations, the discussions and conclusions are also presented.