Jakarta – The Research and Community Service Institution of Bogor University of Agriculture (IPB) has managed to produce an alternative of fire-fighting foam from palm oil. The fire-fighting foam is environmentally-friendly, easily degraded, and its raw material is abundant in Indonesia as the world’s largest producer of palm oil.

“The foaming agent concentrate from palm oil can help extinguish forest, land and peat fires,” Mira Rivai, the head of palm oil-based fire-fighting foam research team of IPB, said during a webinar on strengthening palm oil industry based on new technology resulted from research, on Wednesday, 30 March 2022.

Mira said that her team had managed to make a prototype of the foaming agent concentrate at a production scale of 100 liters per day. “It covers saponification reactor and homogenization reactor,” said the PhD holder, who also works with IPB Surfactant and Bioenergy Research Center.

The foaming agent concentrate contains surfactant as main component which functions to improve the efficiency of water use. It can increase the effectiveness and efficiency in extinguishing fire.

Indonesian industries’ need for surfactant is very high, but it is now fulfilled with imported ones. It is due to the limited amount and types of surfactant in Indonesia.

But the palm oil as the raw material for the production of synthetic surfactant is hugely available in Indonesia. Besides environmentally-friendly, the foaming agent concentrate from palm oil has low toxicity as the raw material to produce the fire-fighting foam.

As a raw material for the production of fire-suppression foam, the foaming agent concentrate serves to form foam, which is effective to be used to extinguish fires at big scale. Its role is to cool the fire and blanket the burning material, and prevent re-contact with oxygen that may reignite the fire.

“The use of foaming agent for extinguishing fire can speed up the time of extinguishing by 75% compared to the use of peat water. Extinguishing fire with foaming agent will need 100 liters of the foam per meter while with peat water it will need 154.17 liters,” said Mira, who earned her bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from IPB.

She said that the development of palm oil-based firefighting foam will push up the production of foaming agent concentrate from palm oil fatty acids in Indonesia. “It will grow local economies and create new job opportunities in the locations of production areas,” she said. (*)

Source: TEMPO.CO | Featured image via eonchemicals.com