Innovative production of highly porous carbon for industrial effluent remediation via microwave vacuum pyrolysis plus sodium-potassium hydroxide mixture activation

By Rock Keey Liew, C. Chai, P. Yek, Xue Yee Phang, M. Chong, Wai Lun Nam, M. Su, W. Lam, N. Ma, S. Lam. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This study reports a novel method using microwave vacuum pyrolysis combined with sodium-potassium hydroxide mixture (NaOH-KOH) activation to produce highly porous activated carbon (AC) from palm residue (i.e. palm kernel shell, PKS) – a solid residue constantly produced in large volume by palm industry. The yield and properties of AC produced were found significantly influenced by two key process parameters - type of activating agent and chemical impregnation ratio. The pyrolysis provided fast heating rate (60 °C/min), high temperature (607 °C), and short process time (35 min) to convert PKS into biochar, and the subsequent activation by NaOH-KOH mixture at 1.0 of chemical impregnation ratio resulted in 84 wt% yield of AC. The AC possessed high BET surface area (1320 m2/g) and highly porous structure formed by micro- and meso-pores, thus showing high adsorption capacity. The adsorption capacity of AC was examined via impregnation with nickel and aluminium atoms (termed “Ni/AC” and “Al/AC”) followed by application in treating industrial effluent abundantly released from palm oil mill (termed ‘palm oil mill effluent, POME). Both Ni/AC and Al/AC showed high removal efficiency in reducing the total suspended solid (TSS), oil and grease (O&G), biochemical (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) in POME. Higher removal efficiency on BOD and COD was observed for Ni/AC and Al/AC than normal AC (non-metallic AC). The production cost of AC using this pyrolysis method was estimated to be ranged from 4 to 10 USD/kg. The results show the exceptional promise of this pyrolysis method as an approach to transform PKS into highly porous AC for utilize as an adsorbent to treat POME.

Subfields: Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2e4f721c3f253e862c30e66091ce27a6269ce1ae

Citations in the corpus

• New trends in biochar pyrolysis and modification strategies: feedstock, pyrolysis conditions, sustainability concerns and implications for soil amendment (2020, unknown): “The most widely used alkaline agents are potassium hydroxide (KOH) (Bashir, Zhu, Fu, & Hu, 2018; Wang, Wang, & Wang, 2018; Wang, Ma, et  al., 2019) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH) (Bogota, Sokolowska, Skic, & Tomczyk, 2019; Liu, Xue, Gao, Cheng, & Yang, 2016).”
• Lignin utilization: A review of lignin depolymerization from various aspects (2019, unknown): “show that microwave pyrolysis could be an economic approach for converting biomass to valuable and high-quality active carbon [82] Furthermore, microwave contains lesser mechanic unit and can be accurately controlled during the operation [83].”