Fabrication and performance evaluation of a pelletizer for oil palm residues and other biomass waste materials

Abstract

Fuel pellet is a renewable and affordable alternative fuel to natural gas in view of the current challenges facing the power sector due to shortage in gas supply for firing the thermal power plants which is caused by frequent pipeline vandalisation and ever-rising cost. Fuel pellets can be made manually or by machines.In this paper, a screw press pellet making machine was fabricated and test performance was carried out. Waste from NIFOR such as palm kernel shell, palm fibre and empty fruit bunch were collected and pulverised while waste paper was used as binding material.
Interestingly, the performance of the machine shows that it is highly efficient and effective compared to other locally made pelleting machines. The dimension of the each pelletproducedis 50mm indiameter and 70mm in length, while the mass is 0.15kg. The performance efficiency of the machine is 75% and it canproduce about 25pellets from 5kg mixture in 6mins.