Characteristics of carbon derived from plasma-assisted pyrolysis of oil palm kernel shell waste

In this study, oil palm kernel shell as a solid waste was treated by high-temperature plasma-assisted pyrolysis. This treatment used an argon as a gas source and applied 12 V DC voltage for generating plasma. The current was varied for 50 A, 60 A, 70 A and 80 A. This treatment yielded carbon-based material as a solid product. Some material characterizations, such as Raman spectroscopy, TEM, XRD and FT-IR were used to characterize carbon products. Raman spectra of all samples showed the characteristics of carbon that were indicated by D and G branch peaks. FT-IR characterizations showed that C-OH bonds dominated at all samples. TEM image results showed that there are crystalline surrounded by amorphous, while the crystalline fractions tend to have hexagonal structure characteristics based on SAED analysis. XRD analyses showed that all of the samples tend to have low-order crystalline characteristics. Thus, by combining all of the characteristics, all samples were characterized as turbostratic carbon allotropes. Therefore, the optimum graphitic structure characteristics of the turbostratic product was obtained at a current of 60 A.