Palm Oil Sludge as a Binding Agent for Briquette Production

This study included the production of biomass briquettes from discarded cotton flock, an industrial byproduct. To boost densification, cotton flock was mixed with palm oil sludge at a ratio of 1:1. The quality factors include the shatter index, calorific value, water boiling test, flash point, and density of the final briquette was examined. Test results indicate that the free fatty acid percentage of sludge palm oil at room temperature was 32%. The moisture content of sludge palm oil was discovered to be 8%. The raw material was fed to the manual briquetting machine to densify by 50% to achieve a final height of 4 cm. It was determined that the briquette's shatter index was 99.5%. The calorific value of the briquette has been calculated to be 39.5MJ/kg. The density of the briquette, which was measured to be 816 kg/m3. It was established that the moisture percentage and ash content of the briquette were 5.8% and 15.1%, respectively. The cotton flock with sludge palm oil as the binding agent produce high quality fire briquette to replace the biomass requirement in the industrial combustion process.