Pemanfaatan Spent Bleaching Earth dari Proses Pemucatan CPO sebagai Bahan Baku Briket

Abstract

Refining process of crude palm oil in refinery which involves bleaching generates plenty of spent bleaching earth. The spent bleaching earth serves as byproduct, which still contains 20-30% w/w of crude palm oil. The research formulated spent bleaching earth and charcoal of oil palm shell as the briquette materials. Charcoal of oil palm shell was choosen because both of them are waste from processing the oil palm. In addition, charcoal of oil palm shell has the high caloric value, so its suitable as the added material for production a briquette. There were two objectives in this research. The main objective was to study the utilization of spent bleaching earth from crude palm oil bleaching process as briquette material. The spesific objective was to study the effect of combination of glue consentration and charcoal of oil palm shell concentration toward the quality of briquette. This research utilized completely randomized factorial design with two factors, i.e. glue concentration factor and charcoal of oil palm shell concentration factor. The glue concentration factor were varied at 2% (A1), 3% (A2), and 4% (A3). The concentration of charcoal of oil palm shell were varied at 25% (B1), 50% (B2), and 75% (B3). The variance analyses showed that the increase of glue consentration affected significantly and increased the volatile matter content but decreased fixed carbon content of briquette. The increase of charcoal oil palm shell concentration affected significantly and increased the moisture content and crushing strength but decreased the volatile matter content and ash content. Furthermore, the interaction of two factors affected significantly the moisture content of briquette. Based on the characteristic of the spent bleaching earth sample, it was found that spent bleaching earth contained 26,325% w/w of residual oil, moisture content 3,727% w/w, volatile matter 32,230% w/w, ash content 68,416% w/w, fixed carbon content 0,354% w/w, and caloric value 6796 cal/gram. The best treatment combination of all the experimental units was briquette A1B3 (glue concentration 2% and charcoal of oil palm shell concentration 75%). This treatment resulted the lowest volatile matter content about 18,021%, the lowest ash content 20,100%, the lowest fixed carbon content 61,879%, and the caloric value about 6528 cal/gram. This briquette could boil three liters of water in 75,26