Torrefaction on Rice Husk, Paddy Straw and Coconut Shell To Improve Its Properties For Enhancing Gasification Efficiency

Shortage of fossil fuels has forcing people to find out alternatives to fulfill their needs
especially in transportation, industrial sector, and residential sector. Many types of
alternatives energy have been developed where hydrogen energy is part from that.
Furthemore, the demand of producing this energy had arised especially during the oil
crisis. One of the ways to produce hydrogen is through gasification process. However,
this process always has problems which reducing its efficient. Problem like condensable
tar formation and ash formation should be solved in order to make sure the amount of
gas produced is significant then can meet the customer’s demand. Gasification process
used biomass as its feed. Hence, the large number of biomass in Malaysia like rice husk,
coconut shell and rice straw which can be found mostly at northern and east-coat states
(Kedah, Perlis and Kelantan) have high potential to be developed to be used as
gasification feed. However, the nature features of these biomasses like having high
moisture content and moderate calorific value would contribute to another problem in
gasifier like tar formation later. Moreover, highly cost may be needed to extract potential
values of energy rice husks if no earlier treatement be done on it. Due to that, author has
interested to do research on this process which entitled as “Torrefaction on rice husk,
paddy straw, and coconut shell to improve its properties for enhancing gasification
efficiency”.The purpose to enhance the efficiency is to increase the production rate of
hydrogen from biomass gasification process. This project aims to develop torrefied
biomass that has desired properties like lower moisture content and higher calorific
value. Two parameters are being observed in the experiment which is particular sizes
and torrefaction temperature. The reaction time will be constant at 1 hour and 30
minutes. Two particular sizes are studied which are 250μm and 500μm. At the same
time, two different torrefaction temperatures are studied which are 240 and 280 degree
Celcius. In general, the experiment results prove that the properties of samples (biomass)
can be improved where has lower moisture content and also have higher calorific value.
Higher torrefaction temperature (280 degree Celcius) makes more moisture being
released to the air as well as gaining higher calorific value. Smaller particular size (250
μm) also contributes to higher evaporation rate of moisture content compared to samples
at size 500 μm.