A Comparison Study on Oven and Solar Dried Empty Fruit Bunches

Abstract

In this paper, the characteristics of empty fruit bunches (EFB) of oil palm for washed and unwashed samples of oven and solar dried are presented. The proximate, ultimate and hydrolysis analyses were carried out to find the characteristics of the samples. The higher heating values (HHV) were determined by bomb calorimeter technique and, the lower heating values (LHV) were determined via calculation. The results from the proximate analysis showed that the moisture, ash, volatile and fixed carbon of the unwashed oven dried EFB was 6.8 mf wt%, 4.8 mf wt%, 80.9 mf wt% and 14.3 mf wt%, respectively. The carbon content and other elements of the EFB are also presented in the paper. It was also found that the higher heating value and lower heating value of the unwashed oven dried sample was 18.72 MJ/kg and 17.26 MJ/kg, respectively. Furthermore, the atomic absorption spectrophotometer analysis (AAS) was conducted to determine the metal content of the EFB sample and thermogravimetri analysis (TGA) was also carried out to study the degradation behavior of the EFB.

Keywords: characteristic of EFB; washed EFB; unwashed EFB; solar drying; oven drying