Biogas Production from Decanter Cake of Palm Oil Mill from South India

Abstract

Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) is a liquid waste from palm oil factory that pollutes the environment but is very useful as a raw material for producing biogas. POME processing has advantages to meet environmental requirements and to produce commercialized products. Although there are already enough biogas systems installed in oil palm factories, there are handful of players in this sector who can design and install an optimal working plant on palm oil mill effluent. The design involves many parameters and quite complicated process. Apart from POME the palm oil mills also generate solid cake from their decanters which is also known as decanter muck or decanter cake. There are no biogas plants observed which were working on this decanter muck. The purpose of this study is to obtain an understanding about the biogas system utilizing solid decanter cake in Southern part of India. Various dilution rates were studied to understand the best possible feedstock to water ratio in terms of gas generation and better stability of the digester. These concentrations also showed difference in CH4 concentration as well and ranged between 70 – 79%. Since it was seen that the internal process before the decanter varies with every batch as well as with every palm oil mill and so does the feedstock characteristics which is the inlet of the digester varies. It was found that when one kilogram of feedstock when fed to the lab scale digester it showed 0.075 – 0.12 m3 of raw biogas with different methane percentages and at different temperature levels. It was found that 38 Deg C was optimum and the study was carried out at various retention times and 20 days was found to be the best to digest decanter muck. KEYWORD: Palm Oil, POME, Decanter Muck, Digester, Biogas, Gas, CH4 How to cite this paper: S J Malik | Aparna Saraf | Srinivas Kasulla "Biogas Production from Decanter Cake of Palm Oil Mill from South India" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-5 | Issue-1, December 2020, pp.1144-1147, URL: www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd38147.pdf Copyright © 2020 by author(s) and International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development Journal. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)