Conversion of Solid Biomass Waste (Oil Palm Shell) Into Potassium Based Fertilizers

The aim of this project is to study the conversion of solid biomass waste using oil palm shell into potassium based fertilizer using different parameters such as the concentration of the sulphuric acid, the effect of stirring time for dissolving process, the effect of temperature and the effect of healing time. Empty fruit bunch (EFB) were chosen in this project because it can be used as reference for the oil palm shell to produce potassium based fertilizer since people already used empty fruit bunch as their source of fertilizer. Oil palm shell and empty fruit bunch have high content of potassium in their ashes which are 12.1% and 48.3% respectively. The problems arise when solid waste increases annually from the waste of the oil palm industry which can create disposal problems that lead to the environmental problems. The experiment conducted by incinerates the oil palm shell and empty fruit bunch to obtain the ashes that will be added with different concentration of Sulphuric acid.The qualities of the potassium baser fertilizer are determined by the concentration of the fertilizers and its pH value. High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) will be used to determine the concentration of the components of the fertilizer by calculating the area under peak and the retention time. From the result obtained from the experiments, the best fertilizer from the experiment for oil palm shell is from 20 mL of 0.08M of Sulphuric acid was added with the stirring time of 50 minutes while for empty furit bunch is from 20 mL of 0.2M Sulphuric acid with the stirring time of 50 minutes. The concentration of Potassium and the pH of the fertilizer for empty fruit bunch is 0.5776 mg/L and 8.05 while for oil palm shell is 0.4405 mg/L and 8.12, respectively. The concentration of Potassium could be more accurate if the High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) can detect the components inside the fertilizers by showing the peak and area under the graph for every components inside the fertilizer.As a recommendation, a future work may be done by studying the effect of Potassium based fertilizer from oil palm shell to the plants and studying on how to increase the Potassium content inside the fertilizer from oil palm shell.