Palletization and characterization of torrefied oil palm empty fruit bunch (opefb) biochar

Dependence on fossil fuel as the main energy source has led to various negative impact upon human and environment. Uncontrolled use of fossil fuel leads to emission of greenhouse gases which later caused problems such as global warming and acid rain. Instable price of fossil fuel also caused variety of problems to daily life of human. Malaysia is well known as among world largest exporter of palm oil products; therefore providing us with abundant source of palm oil wastes. These bio wastes are highly potential as a replacement for the current fossil fuel; one of it is palm oil empty fruit bunch (POEFB). Torrefaction has been identified as a suitable pre-treatment process to increase the qualities of untreated POEFB. Torrefaction is mild pyrolysis process under low oxygen condition to imitate decomposition of long hydrocarbon process in POEFB. Instead of torrefection, palletization of torrrefied biochar such an improvement can be made on the final desired product. This research would like to study the improvement on pelletized torrefied with natural binder as an additive. The final product was characterized using Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen and Sulphur (CHNS) analyzer, SEM and FTIR. The clay as a natural binder with different ratio successfully proved that it could turn to a better quality bio-pellet compared to raw OPEFB pellet. The durability also shown that raw OPEFB and torrefied biochar is the weakest sample with 0% durability compared with torrefied pelletied biochar with the highest number percentage of durability which is 72.8%. Morphology and bonding behaviour analysis demonstrated strong bonds within the internal structures of produced bio-pellet samples and it was influenced by the degradation of the lignocellulose, hemicellulose, cellulose and lignin