The Physical, Chemical and Combustion Characteristics of EFB Fuel Briquettes

The abundance of empty fruit bunches (EFB) from oil palm mill made them an economically attractive and viable source of energy nowadays. Converting pyrolyzed EFB into densified solid fuel (briquette) could overcome the troublesome of using raw material which has low energy density and lack of uniform properties for domestic and industrial energy utilization. In this work, EFB is pyrolyzed at 400 degrees C under heating rate of 10 degrees C/min for at least 2 hours to obtain char and pyrolysis liquid needed. Char is prepared as a main source for the briquette mixture, meanwhile the pyrolysis liquid acts as the binder. Both char and pyrolysis liquid were mixed at various percentage of concentrations; 90:10, 80:20, 70:30 and 60:40, and then manually compressed at 10MPa for at least 10 minutes. The results of the properties found that the proportion of 60:40 mixtures has the highest density value of approximately around 0.95 g/cm(3), with largest weight loss of production up to 4.83%. The increased pyrolysis liquid added into the mixture has seemly lowered the energy value of the briquette from 23.13 to 21.23 MJ/kg. In the burning test determination, briquettes mixture of 70:30 was found to generate the highest temperature up to 483 degrees C compared to others, and could retain a temperature of 100 degrees C for at least 10 minutes after the flame was gradually put out by itself.