Abstract:
Palm oil production is becoming popular both locally and globally. During the refining
process of palm oil, one of the main processes is to mechanically crush the fresh palm
fruit bunches in order to produce crude palm oil, which is refined thereafter. During the
mechanical crushing processes, empty fruit bunches (EFB) and palm oil mill effluent
(POME) are produced as wastes, leading to considerable negative environmental
impact if not processed systematically and timely. However, as these wastes are rich in
organic matter, they are naturally suitable as fertilizer for plants, if decomposed as
compost fertilizer. Such composted EFB and POME can be directly used at oil Palm
plantations as a free fertilizer. However, conventional composting methods demand
more time, land area and man power. Out of that, particularly the time is the main factor
where conventional composting usually takes 2-3 months, which is not fast enough to
meet the industrial demand to cater higher EFB and POME generations. In this
background, this research focused to develop a semi-automated small scale EFB and
POME composting machine which can mainly reduce the composting cycle time, land
area and man power. The designed composter consist of a horizontally placed
stationary metallic cylinder having 2001 capacity and an internal bladed shaft wnich is
rotated using an electric motor. The metallic cylinder acts as the storage cabin, which is
filled with composting ingredients EFB ana POME at 1:3 weight ratio. During the
experiments, the cylinder was filled for about 60% and the shaft was made to rotate at 2
rpm to facilitate slow mixing of the ingredients. At the bottom half of the cylinder,
metallic tubes were installecl which carry hot water at 60 °C, so that the appropriate
higher temperature environment is maintained to speed up the composting process.
Additionally, controlled amount of fresh air was allowed to enter the cabin. Using this
setup, a series of experiments were conducted and it was found out that when the
composting is set to occur inside of the semi-automated composter for 3 to 7 days, there
is a considerable volume reduction (approximately 70%), which is mainly due to
composting. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the semi-automated
composter system can reduce the composting time of EFB and POME mixture.
However, further experimentation need to be conducted in order to identify the
optimum feed mixture, rotating speeds, moisture contents and the temperatures to be
maintained at the composting mixture in order to achieve faster and economical
composting.
