View Item 

Dewatering of Anaerobic Digested Sludge with Oil Palm Biomass as Novel Physical Conditioner

Access Status
Fulltext not available
Authors
Chan, Z.Y.
Lau, Shiew Wei
Chua, Han
Date
2012
Type
Conference Paper

Metadata
Show full item record
Citation
Chan, Z.Y. and Lau, S.W. and Chua, H.B. 2012. Dewatering of Anaerobic Digested Sludge with Oil Palm Biomass as Novel Physical Conditioner, in Bono, A. and Sipaut, C.S. (ed), Proceedings of the 26th Symposium of Malaysian Chemical Engineers in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering, Nov 21-23 2012, pp. 205-211. Sabah, Malaysia: Universiti Malaysia Sabah.
Source Title
The 26th Symposium of Malaysian Chemical Engineers in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering
Source Conference
Proceedings of the 26th Symposium of Malaysian Chemical Engineers in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering
ISBN
School
Sarawak Malaysia
URI
Collection
Abstract

This study investigated the use of oil palm biomass, namely empty fruit bunch (EFB), palm kernel shell (PKS), and the biomass residue, palm ash (PA), as physical conditioner, to improve the dewaterability of anaerobic digested sludge. The dewatering performance of the conditioned sludge in this work was evaluated with four common measurements i.e. the capillary suction time (CST), specific resistance to filtration (SRF), net sludge solids yield (YN), and moisture content of the sludge cake. Amongst all the biomass samples, the ground EFB passing through a 0.6-mm mesh sieve indicated the highest reduction in SRF and the highest gain in YN at solids mass ratio of conditioner to sludge of 1.6. When the conditioned sludge was subjected to filtration dewatering, the presence of oil palm biomass in sludge may act as a skeleton builder to provide a porous, permeable and rigid lattice sludge cake structure which allows the passage of water and consequently enhances water removal from sludge.