UPDRAFT GASIFICATION OF OIL PALM FRONDS

As a leader in palm oil production, Malaysia produces tremendous quantities of oil
palm frond (OPF) during harvesting, pruning and replanting activities period. Up to
now, most of the generated fronds are left rotting in the plantations mainly for nutrient
recycling resulting in several environmental problems. The huge quantities of fronds
every year make them a very promising source for energy generation. Many activates
were carried out to convert the fronds into valuable products, but there was no report
on study of updraft gasification of oil palm fronds. In this work, small scale updraft
gasifier was built to investigate experimentally the behavior and performance of the
updraft gasification of oil palm fronds with air as the gasification agent.