BIO-OIL PRODUCTION FROM OIL PALM STEM USING FLUIDIZED BED REACTOR

Oil palm is one of the major economic crops in many countries. Malaysia alone
produces about 47"/o ofthe world's palm oil supply and can be considered as the world's
largest producer and exporter of palm oil. Malaysia also generates huge quantity of oil
palm biomass including oil palm trunks, oil palm fronds, empty fruit bunches (EFB),
shells and fibers as waste from palm oil fruit harvest and oil extraction processing. This
study presents an investigation on the production of bio-oil from biomass by fast
pyrolysis process. Oil palm stem with the fraction size of 0.15 - 5 mm was utilized in
this study. In this work, fust pyrolysis of oil palm stem was carried out in a fluidized bed
fast pyrolysis unit under nitrogen gas flowrate of I.32 m31h, with reactor temperature of
450 •c. The fluidized bed fust pyrolysis unit has six successive condensers. Thus, six
fractions of bio-oil samples were acquired from the six condensers and each of them
were characterized in term of moisture content, calorific value, ash content and element
content. The bio-oil yield was II% and the highest calorific value among the six bio-oil
samples was I6.2 MJ/kg. The chemical characterization and calculation of residence
time showed that the condition of pyrolysis in this experiment is not fuvorable in
producing bio-oi~ however effective to produce bio-char.