Resumen
Renewable energy is becoming more popular worldwide due to economic crisis and critical source of conventional fossil fuel such as coal, petroleum, diesel and natural gas. Empty fruit bunch (EFB) char is one of the renewable energy sources that can replace coal and act as a fuel to generate steam and electricity. In this study, microwave pyrolysed EFB char was co-combusted with coal in order to achieve high efficiency for power generation from biomass/coal blends compared to the use of biomass standalone. The aim for this study was to identify the synergistic effect during co-combustion between EFB char with Mukah Balingian (MB) coal blends by using Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analyser. The surface area of EFB char and MB coal blends were investigated over a range of different weight ratio and temperature. In this research, the weight ratio of EFB char/MB coal blends were from 100:0, 60:40, 20:80, and 0:100 and the temperature for co-combustion will be conducted at 400, 600, and 700°C. Raw EFB was pyrolyzed in microwave pyrolysis condition at 300 W exposed for 35 minutes. The resulting solid char was mixed with MB coal at different blending ratio prior to undergoing co-combustion in furnace. The results revealed that the surface area is inversely proportional to temperature of combustion. The higher the combustion temperature, the lower the BET surface area. Besides that, as the mass fraction of EFB char increases, the surface area of pores decreases. The synergistic effect was analyzed by comparing the actual and predicted BET surface area generated by linear equation. From the comparison, the actual BET surface area obtained experimentally does not synchronize with the predicted BET surface area due to interaction occur between the blends. This can be concluded that there is a synergistic effect occur on the co-combustion of EFB char with MB coal.