Nik Azmi Nik Mahmood

Optimisation of a modified submerged bed biofilm reactor for biological oleochemical wastewater treatment

Oleochemicals industry effluence mainly contains a high chemical oxygen demand (COD) in a range of 6000-20,000 ppm. An effective biological wastewater treatment process must be carried out before wastewater is discharged into the environment. In this study, a submerged bed biofilm reactor (SBBR) was adapted to the biological oleochemical wastewater treatment plant observed in the present study. The effect of wastewater flow rate (100-300 mL/min), Cosmoball® percentage in the SBBR system (25-75%), and percentage of activated sludge (0-50%) were investigated in terms of COD reduction. The Box-Behnken design was used for response surface methodology (RSM) and to create a set of 18 experimental runs, which was needed for optimising the biological oleochemical wastewater treatment. A quadratic polynomial model with estimated coefficients was developed to describe COD reduction patterns. The analysis of variance (ANOVA) shows that the wastewater flow rate was the most effective factor in reducing COD, followed by activated sludge percentage and Cosmoball® carrier percentage. Under the optimum conditions (i.e., a wastewater flow rate of 103.25 mL/min a Cosmoball® carrier percentage of 71.94%, and an activated sludge percentage of 40.50%) a COD reduction of 98% was achieved. Thus, under optimum conditions, as suggested by the BBD, SBBR systems can be used as a viable means of biological wastewater treatment in the oleochemicals industry.

Kajian awal penghasilan elektrik oleh Basilli El menggunakan sel bahan api mikroorganisma dwi-kebuk

Microbial fuel cell (MFC) is a developed technology to utilize microbial degradation ability and turned the degradation products to electricity. One of the limiting factor that contributes to the performance level of MFC is the microorganism used in the MFC. In the present research, Bacilli E1 has been tested for its ability to utilize glucose and converted it to electricity in dual chamber MFC. The MFC operated using E1 produced a maximum average of open circuit voltage (OCV) of 0.8 V. Meanwhile, by inserting a 1000 Ω resistance in the MFC circuit, produced a stable voltage of 0.1 V and calculated current and power were 0.2 ± 0.017 mA and 0.1 Wm-2 Comparison of glucose based voltage production between individual and mixed culture shows similar pattern of voltage profile and since individual CC did not show any significant increase of OCV, it was concluded that Bacilli E1 plays major role in the present MFC for power production.

Preliminary Studies on Oleochemical Wastewater Treatment using Submerged Bed Biofilm Reactor (SBBR)

Wastewater discharge from the industry into water sources is one of the main reason for water pollution. The oleochemicals industry effluent produces high content of chemical oxygen demand (COD) with value between 6000-20,000 ppm. Effective treatment is required before wastewater effluent is discharged to environment. The aim of the study is to develop submerged bed biofilm reactor (SBBR) with packing materials in the cosmoball® carrier. Water quality such as chemical oxygen demands (COD), turbidity and pH were analysed. The result shows that the initial COD of 6000 ppm was reduced below 200 ppm. The optimum conditions for SBBR were obtained when green sponges used as packing material in cosmoball®; effluent flowrate set at 100 mL/min; 1:1 ratio of cosmoball® volume to reactor volume and 1:1 ratio of active sludge (mixed culture) volume to reactor volume. Turbidity and pH were recorded with 9.0 NTU and 7.0 respectively, which indicated that SBBR is feasible as an alternative for conventional biological treatment in oleochemical industry.

Electricity generation from palm oil tree empty fruit bunch (EFB) using dual chamber microbial fuel cell (MFC)

Microbial fuel cell (MFC) has been discovered and utilized in laboratory scale for electricity production based on microbial degradation of organic compound. However, various source of fuel has been tested and recently complex biomass such as lignocellulose biomass has been focused on. In the present research, oil palm tree empty fruit bunch (EFB) has been tested for power production using dual chamber MFC and power generation analysis has been conducted to address the performance of MFC. In addition, two microorganisms (electric harvesting microbe and cellulose degrading microbe) were used in the MFC operation. The analysis include voltage produced, calculated current and power. The first section in your paper

Cost Benefit Analysis of Composting and Anaerobic Digestion in a Community: a Review

Currently, population and urbanisation are rapidly growing which causes a tremendous amount of municipal solid waste (MSW) being generated. The MSW management in Malaysia can be considered relatively poor and disorganised. The most preferred MSW disposal method in Malaysia is through landfilling. To address this and to respond to increasing global environmental concerns, composting and anaerobic digestion have been hailed as an environmentally and economically friendly alternative besides landfilling. By capturing the organic materials from MSW and putting it to a more beneficial use as feedstock for composting and anaerobic digestion sounds very ideal. Focusing on the waste landfilling prevention for a small community, this paper discusses on whether composting or anaerobic digestion might be a feasible alternative to landfilling. Both solutions differ in various aspects. The purpose of this study is to know whether composting or anaerobic digestion is more beneficial by performing cost benefit analysis on both situations. In this study we estimated the cost benefit analysis of three different scenarios. First scenario is the baseline for the current practice of solid waste management where the wastes are dumped to landfill. Second scenario is the installation of composting plant and the third scenario will be estimated on the installation of anaerobic digester.

Anodic Ph Evaluation on Performance of Power Generation from Palm Oil Empty Fruit Bunch (efb) in Dual Chambered Microbial Fuel Cell (mfc)

Anodic pH Evaluation on Performance of Power Generation from Palm Oil Empty Fruit Bunch (EFB) in Dual Chambered Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) Nik Azmi Nik Mahmood, Nazlee Faisal Ghazali*, Kamarul’ Asri Ibrahim, Md Abbas Ali Department of Bioprocess and Polymer Engineering, Faculty of Chemical and Energy Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Chemical and Energy Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology, Rajshahi-6204, Bangladesh. nazlee@utm.my

Power Generation from Pre-treated Empty Fruit Bunch Using Single Chamber Microbial Fuel Cell

The utilization of lignocellulosic biomass (LB) as the substrate in Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) have been receive growing interest due to the vast amount of abundant LB side-product that are generated yearly from agriculture field. In this paper the author will be discussing the utilization of Empty Fruit Bunches (EFB), which is one of the LB waste generated from palm oil industry in single chamber MFC (SCMFC) to generate bioelectricity. The microbes used in this study were equivalent volume mixtures of Gram-positive Bacillus E1 and Clostridium cellulolyticum (CC). To enhance the efficiency of the microbes to utilize the EFB for bioelectricity generation, the EFB used were pre-treated first with several pre-treatment method which include physical pre-treatment, hot water pre-treatment and alkaline pre-treatment. Different amount of EFB were tested which include 1.5 g, 3.5 g and 5.5 g of EFB under similar condition with total working volume of 250 mL for anode chamber. Resistor of range 100-100,000 O was connected to the MFC to calculate the current and power generated from the system. Results indicate maximum power was achieved at the value of up to 0.7 W/m2 at above 1.0 A/m2.for all pre-treated EFB tested. The highest power was achieved at 100 O using lower concentration of EFB with a value of 0.678 W/m2. In conclusion, EFB is a feasible substrate for MFC and more studies on improvement of the power generation in progress for larger scale application.