Characteristics study of efb briquettes and its potential use as dual fuel in cvcc
Loading...
Date
 2018-05 
Authors
Mohammad Fairuz Abd Rahman
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
 As a renewable energy, biomass has potential to replace depletion of fossil fuel for 
automotive and power generation applications. In this study, empty fruit bunch (EFB) is 
used as a biomass source to become the producer gas to test into constant volume 
combustion chamber (CVCC). The limitations of fibrous biomass have low bulk density 
from 80-100kg/𝑚3
that give difficulties to store and transport. One of the methods to 
improve the biomass characteristic by using the densification process or called briquetting. 
Roller press machine was used in briquetting process to convert the EFB into pillow-briquette. The pillow-briquettes is based on EFB characterized at different percentage of 
water and binder of tapioca starch. But the briquetting process was failed due to fibrous 
biomass need more compression to become a briquette. So, manually briquette has been 
done which provide more compaction pressure of 100 kPa compared to pillow briquetting
machine of 40 kPa. The manual briquetting used a mold that compacting with hammer to 
produce cylindrical briquette with new composition of water and binder. The quality 
characteristic such as compressive strength and calorific value of EFB has been done via 
compressive load test and calorimeter test. Based on the result obtained, EFB briquette 
with composition of mixture 120%W and 30%S has the highest calorific value which is 
17.394 MJ/kg and highest maximum compressive load which is 939.66 N. This process 
should further to produce the producer gas from EFB briquette to supply into the CVCC 
but there is some constraint that cannot be avoided. In this study, the producer gas that had 
been replaced by liquified petroleum gas (LPG) to run in the CVCC with diesel to identify 
the spray and combustion characteristic. The visualization technique to measure the 
macroscopic spray characteristic such as spray tip penetration, spray cone angle and spray 
width. The injection pressure of diesel was varied from 60 MPa to 100 MPa and injected 
to the CVCC with combusted LPG. Tip penetration of 100 MPa and 80 MPa have the same 
value which is 57 mm due to maximum radius of CVCC but spray cone angle of 100MPa 
has the highest value which is 11.7mm thus affected the widest width of spray. In addition, 
the injection pressure of 100MPa of diesel produced biggest yellow flame.