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Indonesia has abundant natural biomass resources, particularly from oil palm plantations that have not been used properly. One type of biomass is oil palm tree trunks that are no longer productive, or over 25 years of planting period. The goal of this research is to investigate the potential of palm oil trunk as a raw material for cofiring in drop tube furnace. Palm oil trunk divided into three parts: Upper Trunk (UT), Middle Trunk (MT), and Lower Trunk (LT) as test samples. Drop Tube Furnace (DTF) equipment conducted to identify combustion properties at 550 and 600 °C in the form of ash deposit and emission gas. Ash deposition is determined through physical observation, proximate testing, and ultimate analysis. As a form of real-time monitoring, the combustion gas is evaluated using a portable gas meter. In comparison to the MT and LT samples, the physical observation probe of the UT sample revealed significantly more corrosive deposits. At the measured temperature of 550 °C, 0.1719 gr, 0.1357 gr, and 0.0233 gr of ash were deposited on UT, MT, and LT samples, respectively. While ash deposit at 600 °C for UT, MT, and LT, was 0.1924, 0.1445, and 0.1904 gr, respectively. Furthermore, the observed combustion gases exhibit emission levels were below environmental safety standard. The high quantity of ash, and corrosion left on the probe, indicate that palm oil trunk wasn't promised as cofiring material. Further research should study about appropriate composition as cofiring material with slagging and fouling indices consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biomass has a potential to reduce fossil fuel demand in power plant. The potential of sorghum in Indonesia are 54,000 ton annually. However, the characteristics of sorghum need to be studied to reduce slagging and fouling problem in co-firing with an Indonesian coal. Slagging and fouling potential could be obtained by theoretical calculation and ash observation method. BTC Coal, BMS Biomass, and blend of both, C-5, C-10, and C-15, are used as samples. This study is conducted by using several indices of slagging and fouling as a theoretical calculation method. AFT, XRF, and XRD analysis is also conducted to represent an ash observation method. The ash from combustion is analyzed by using XRF and XRD analysis to find element and mineral in the ash. The prediction calculation shows the highest slagging potential is BMS because its composite index score indicates high risk although other calculation predictions have a similar result. In the blend samples, those potential are similar with BTC. In AFT result, BMS also has a high risk based on AFI. In the blend samples, blending with 10% BMS or above increase the risk of a blend to high risk. In XRF analysis, BMS has bad potential for slagging and fouling because the content of K in the ash is high. Although it also increases K content in the blends, the percentage of Si and Al in the blends still indicate medium risk similar with BTC. In XRD analysis, most of samples have high slagging and fouling potential because the samples have a high percentage of harmful minerals except BTC because it is still dominated by a harmless mineral. Therefore, blending BTC with 5% BMS or above could increase the slagging and fouling potential based on XRD analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesia is a maritime country with a coastline length of more than 95 thousand km, and the ocean area exceeds 3 million km2 covering almost two third of the nation. With the vast ocean area, Indonesia has a large potential for maritime organisms, such as macroalgae or popularly called seaweed. Indonesia has more than 500 species of seaweed, but only a few that has been utilized, and mainly as food or pharmaceutical resources. Whereas Indonesian macroalgae potential as an energy feedstock is still not much explored. In this study, we assessed the potential of less-utilized macroalgae species from Indonesia, namely Padina sp., as feedstock to produce hydrochar in comparison with other species. The proximate and ultimate characteristic of macroalgae as feedstock was investigated, and its potential to generate hydrochar was discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]