Performance analysis of fabricated bio-filtration system for small-scaled greywater treatment: TSS and turbidity removals

River pollution, which is mainly due to excessive drainage of untreated domestic greywater, has becoming a serious concern in both poor and developing areas like Sarawak in the current years. Realizing the vital role of Sarawak rivers, the need to improve the level of pollution, demand for clean freshwater resources, as well as to save cost on household water supply, the greywater generated daily from every household needs to be pretreated for reuse, otherwise, discharged. This further demands for cost-effective pretreatment technology for domestic and residential use. This research, therefore, analyzes the efficiency of a low-cost biofiltration system which utilizes agricultural wastes, namely rice husk and coconut coir, as biofilter media to improve the quality of greywater effluent samples in terms of total suspended solids (TSS) and turbidity removals. This paper presents the extended results obtained from the previous research work using the same fabricated pre-treatment system, which consists of six main units i.e. wastewater storage tank, water feed tank, pre-sedimentation tank, bio-filter, postsedimentation tank and treated water storage tank. The system is operated for six hours to complete several cycles of treatment. At every one-hour interval, both TSS and turbidity levels of the wastewater samples are recorded and the removal performances are evaluated and analyzed. Positive outcomes are attained from this research study such that the rice husk system is able to reduce the TSS and turbidity levels by 49.06% i.e. from 53.00 mg/L to 27.00 mg/L with an average rate of 4.33 mg/L.hr, as well as 57.79% i.e. from 41.70 FNU to about 17.60 FNU, at a rate of 4.02 FNU/hr respectively. Besides, the coconut coir bio-filtration system achieves TSS removal efficiency of 49.70% i.e. from 65.60 mg/L to 33.00 mg/L at mean rate of 5.43 mg/L.hr, and 63.10% turbidity removal i.e. from 48.40 FNU to 17.86 FNU, at 5.09 FNU/hr respectivel

Characteristics of calcined palm oil pastes for biosilica extraction as a function of calcination temperatures

Palm oil production in Malaysia has increased over the years. As the consequence of high production of palm oil, surplus quantities of palm oil biomass wastes such as empty fruit bunches (EFB), palm kernel shell (PKS), and oil palm decanter cake (DC) are generated. Generally, these wastes are used as fuel to generate steam for boilers, which end up as ash. As several agricultural wastes are well-known to be rich in silica content, this study aims to investigate the bio-silica content of EFB, PKS and DC and their characteristics when calcined at various calcination temperatures from 400°C to 800°C. Several analyses were conducted such as weight loss, color, BET, SEM and FTIR. The results have shown that all samples favorably exhibited silica at higher temperatures, i.e., 800°C. Color analysis depicted that combustible elements were mostly removed at 800°C, leaving non-combusted silica in the waste ash. Weight loss analysis presented that EFB achieved the highest weight loss at 99.05%, followed by PKS at 95.65% and DC at 83.95%. This led to a relatively high amount or purity of silica in the sample. BET analysis showed highest surface area, 20.087m2/g (PKS) and the lowest is 9.492m2/g (DC) at 800°C which verified the high porosity of samples for further absorption applications. The presence of silica was also significantly observed in 800°C FTIR spectra for all waste samples. Overall, it is concluded that EFB, PKS, and DC are highly potential wastes to contribute to the production of bio-silica, which thus can be an option to overcome waste disposal issues in palm oil industries

Effect of temperature to the properties of sago starch

Recently, the importance of sago starch has increased, as it has become one of the main economically important agricultural crops to the most Southeast Asia countries. In the present work, an analysis on drying process of sago starch (Metroxylon sagu Rottb.) underwent various temperature has been made by using four empirical equations. The main goal of this analysis is to suggest the most accurate equation, in order to model and simulate the mechanical drying of sago starch. The experimental investigations were carried out in a gravity convection lab oven; and ±50g of sago starch (sample heights of 1 cm) was dried through four different temperatures, which were 50, 60, 70 and 80ºC. The effect of drying temperature on the drying kinetics, as well as various qualities attributes of sago starch, such as microstructure, colour and functional properties were investigated. The results suggested that drying temperature has significant effect on sago starch drying kinetic; therefore, drying temperature would be the basis to select drying condition. Meanwhile, it was found that the various drying temperature ranging from 50 to 80ºC affected the product quality especially in term of colour