Characterization study on oil palm empty fruit bunches as bioenergy feedstock

Abstract

There is a lot of scope for fuel production from the unexploited potential of wastes generated from agro processing industries. In the case of palm oil processing industries, four different wastes are produced from various unit operations of palm oil production viz., empty fruit bunches, palm fiber, palm kernel and decanted cake. Among these oil palm empty fruit bunches (OPEFB) was found to be abundantly available. In order to recover energy from this waste, preliminary studies like proximate analysis and thermo-gravimetric analysis were conducted to analyze its characteristics to use it as a bioenergy feedstock. The proximate analysis reveals that the moisture content of OPEFB is relatively higher. The thermal behavior was analyzed in TG Analyzer (TGA) at different heating rates of 20, 30, 40, and 50˚C/min. There were three peaks appeared in all the thermo-grams and temperature ranges for maximum weight loss of the selected biomass sample was also reported. From the study, OPEFB was found to be well suitable for fuel production through thermochemical conversion route.