SURABAYA – The Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS) has developed a hybrid membrane technology for processing biogas from palm oil mill effluent (POME), the liquid waste of palm oil mills. The technological innovation was initiated by three students of the chemistry department of Science and Data Analysis Faculty (FSAD) of the Surabaya-based ITS.
The tree students are Sarazen Shalahuddin Akbar, Immanuel Nathanael Lumban Gaol, and Irma Fitriani. With their innovation, they are selected as the first winner of the student scientific writing competition (LKTIM) of Chemistry Fun Days (CFD) 2023 at the University of Padjadjaran in Bandung, West Java, on Saturday, 27 May 2023.
Considering the potential biogas from palm oil wastes, including the liquid waste POME, they realized that Indonesia as the world’s biggest producer of palm oil has a huge potentiality to process the waste into renewable energy.
“Through anaerobic process, the POME waste can be processed into biogas,” Sarazen, ITS Team Leader for the LKTIM CFD 2023, said in a press release received by Bacaini.id on Monday, 29 May 2023.
Sarazen pointed out that POME contains a variety of gas, which includes methane, carbon dioxide, and others. But to produce quality biogas, the main component needed is methane gas.
He said that the availability of carbon dioxide in biogas has negative implication, which reduces burning caloric value that should be reaching 9,100 calories to 4,800 calories per cubic meter.
To tackle the problem, Sarazen and team members created the hybrid membrane technology named Mixed Matrix Membrane (MMM), which is based on polymer polysulfone with composite materials of zif-8.
“With this technology, the carbon dioxide and methane in the biogas from the POME can be separated up to 99.99%,” said the ITS student of batch 2019.
Besides, the use of hybrid membrane technology is a combination of organic membrane and anorganic membrane. The combination is aimed to achieve better performance.
According to Sarazen, the advantages of the use of the hybrid membrane technology includes the optimum performance of separation, better stability, good mechanic power, affordable price, and easy application.
“As this innovation based on theoretical and systematic approach, the challenge of creating this innovation is in assessing a number of theoretical literature and studies, and long time of collecting data,” he said.
Sarazen, the native of Malang, hopes that the scientific writing will undertake laboratory test to make comparisons and to validate the results and ideas in the scientific writing. (*)
Source: Bacaini.id
