In this section, I intend to introduce you briefly to what I did in my past research. During my master’s degree program, I worked on ‘Exploring the potential of oil palm fibre as a clean solid fuel to meet local energy needs in Ghana.’ The experiments were conducted in the Chemical Engineering Lab, Cambridge University.
I have two power point presentations that address the project. The first is a background presentation (.ppt, 27MB) and the other, project set up and results(.ppt, 20MB).
Below is a modified abstract of the paper presented during the 2nd West Africa Society of Agricultural Engineering (WASAE) International Conference on Hunger without frontiers held at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology (KNUST) on September 20-24, 2004.
Comparison with Charcoal and Loose fibre
Loose fibre emissions were quite high. The CO2: CO ratios of loose fibre and briquettes revealed that although generally, briquettes had lower emissions, the advantage of the briquette over the loose fibre [besides the longer and comparatively smokeless burning] was more towards CO2 reductions. Loose fibre had CO2: CO ratio as high as 174 as compared to 89 of briquettes. Comparing briquettes with loose fibre and charcoal showed that briquettes were far better in terms of the pollution per mass of fuel burned (emission factor).
The emission factor of charcoal production (i.e. per unit mass of charcoal produced from wood pyrolysis) was taken from literature. Charcoal has very high CO emissions compared to palm fibre briquettes and in addition, two different experiments revealed a sharp drop in CO emission of Charcoal when palm fibre briquettes were added.
The results suggest co-firing of charcoal and palm fibre briquettes could be a better alternative combustion method especially for indoor utilizers of charcoal store to reduce effect of CO emissions. A charcoal-briquette pollutant ratio of a minimum of 157 existed for CO and 80 for CO2. This may not be the exact value since there might some calibrations errors during the experimental measurements. However the very wide difference, which did not take into account the emissions released during the production of charcoal, could still favour palm fibre briquette. That is, it seems definite that the total emission released during production of charcoal and those released during the actual utilization as fuel would exceed those of palm fibre briquettes.