Furfural recovery from oil palm empty fruit bunch biomass hydrolysate through fixed bed adsorption columns / Fatin Najihah Binti MD Rizuan

Faculty of Chemical and Process Engineering Technology

Final Year Report (Bachelor of Chemical Engineering ) -- Universiti Malaysia Pahang Al-Sultan Abdullah - 2024

Include bibliographical reference

Furfural serves as a versatile platform chemical for synthesizing various value-added compounds, but impurities pose significant challenges in its biomass-based production, hindering purification and escalating costs. To address this, an experiment was conducted to assess the efficacy of activated carbon and amberlite XAD4 adsorbents in recovery furfural from empty fruit bunch (EFB) biomass hydrolysate. In batch experiment, activated carbon's adsorption capacity ranged from 671.46 to 112.02 mg/g, while amberlite XAD4's capacity ranged from 267.14 to 12.01 mg/g. Langmuir and Freundlich isotherm models were applied, with Langmuir favored for activated carbon and Freundlich for XAD4. Utilizing 7.5wt% ethanol as the eluent solvent in fixed bed column achieved furfural recoveries of 88.6% for activated carbon and 51.6% for XAD4. Subsequent adsorption and desorption processes with EFB hydrolysate yielded furfural recoveries of 87.1579% and 80.9932 %for activated carbon and XAD4, respectively, indicating activated carbon's superior performance in both absorption and desorption compared to amberlite XAD4.