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ABSTRACT
This study was aimed to investigate the application of mixing rice straw, coconut shell and rice husk for the production of fuel briquettes in hot compressive process by comparison with Thai Community Product Standards. Rice straw, coconut shell and rice husk were mixed into 6 ratios including 50:0:50, 40:10:50, 30:20:50, 20:30:50, 10:40:50 and 20:80:0 by using briquette machine (hot compressive) at temperature 250 - 270°C. The results showed that the optimum ratio of briquettes was 20% of rice straw mixed with 80% of coconut shell because it gained the highest of calorific value (4,580.5 kcal/kg( and had the closest calorific value to the TCPS standard (5,000 kcal/Kg). To improve combustion characteristics, briquettes were transformed into charcoal by pyrolysis process. The results showed that the conversion of briquette to charcoal by pyrolysis process can increased the calorific value up to 38.43%.
Keywords: solid fuel briquette, charcoal, rice straw, coconut shell, rice husk
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INTRODUCTION
Most people in Koiruttukwa community in Nongchok, Bangkok are agricultural living with sufficiency economy under the royal initiation. In Koiruttukwa community, rice paddy fields are mostly located along Lamsai canal. When the harvest season arrived, most of rice straw has been left as waste from rice cultivation (Samantrakul, 2014). Benefits of rice straw can be used as fertilizer and feeding animal because rice straw has a high nutrient contents. Unfortunately, rice straw is exceeding for fertilizer. Burning is the easiest way to remove this waste causing air pollution and soil degradation as well as soil nutrients diminishing. Another agriculture waste in Koiruttukwa community is coconut shell (Samantrakul, 2014). According to Thailand Institute of Scientific and Technological Research (2007), charcoal made from coconut shell has 4830 kcal/kg of calorific value. Briquette fuel is one of three forms of fuel including solid, liquid and gas converted from carbon-neutral energy resource named biomass (Wang et al., 2015). Biomass as raw materials can be improved their properties including energy parameter density, moisture content and transportation handling by converting it into briquette form. The process of briquetting, raw material is necessary to be dried, chopped and compressed into higher-density briquette. An important derivative could be a briquette fuel which can reduce transportation and storage cost, improve the combustion quality and expand...