Publication: Preparation and characterization of activated carbon from oil palm waste
Date
2016
Authors
Manimugilan Subramaniam
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Abstract
This thesis reports the preparation and characterization of activated carbon from oil palm waste. Currently, there are at least 417 palm oil mills operating around the country. This oil palm mills churn out large amount of oil palm wastes like, empty fruit bunch (EFB) and palm kernel shell (PKS). These wastes will be discarded on the plantation fields to decompose. Instead of throwing it away, it can be used to produce valuable and useful product like activated carbon (AC). This project utilizes the oil palm waste from the Malaysian palm oil industry. The main objective is to prepare and characterize the oil palm empty fruit bunch (EFB) based char and activated carbon (AC). In addition, this project also aims to develop and study the performance of a simple EFB-AC based water filtration system. In this project, empty fruit bunch (EFB) is used as the raw material to prepare and develop AC. Pre-carbonization was done to the EFB in two batches. Then, one batch of EFB was chemically activated using potassium hydroxide (KOH). After that, both the batches were carbonized. The performance of the AC was tested on the adsorption capacity to adsorb suspended particles in the test water and to reduce the cloudiness of the test water. These performances were compared with commercial AC which is available in the market. The AC samples were also sent to several characterization processes to analyse the surface and pores of the samples. It is found that, EFB derived AC reduces the cloudiness of test water and suspended particles inside the test water drastically. EFB derived AC performed better than commercial AC in the simple water filtration test.
Description
TP245.C4 M36 2016
Keywords
Carbon , activited