Pretreatment and Liquefaction of Oil Palm Biomass using Crude Glycerol

(Officer In-charge: Dr. Roila Awang)

 

Lignocellulosic biomass liquefaction with organic solvents is a unique thermocehemical conversion process for biomass utilizations. It combines the useful functional groups from both biomass and organic solvents used in liquefaction, thus obtaining a large variety of polymers. Trough liquefaction, lignocellulosic components are depolymerized to low molecular mass compounds with  high reactivity and high hydroxyl group context (El-barbary et al. 2008). The products of polyhydric alcohol liquefaction could be used directly as polyol without any additional reaction treatment

 

Crude glycerol is a by-product of the biodiesel producton process. The vast availability of glycerol has lead to poor market demand and product devaluation. At present, crude glycerol is of little economic value due to the presence of impurities. Hence, in this study crude glycerol was chosen as one of the liquefaction solvent to solubilizepalm mesocarp pressed fibre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Objective

• To demonstrate the feasibility of using crude glycerol as a pretreatment/liquefaction solvent of oil palm biomass.

• To investigate the effects of crude glycerolproperties on treated product obtained

• To produce bio-based polymers from crude glycerol and lignocellulosic biomass