Improvement of Combustion Quality of Biomass Briquette from Water Hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) for Alternative Energy

Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) is a floating plant species, which spreads rapidly in fresh water area. This plant has found to cause environmental problems, such as clogging drainage, water intakes, and ditches, shading out other aquatic vegetation and interfering with fishing, shipping as well as recreational activities. In contrast to its drawbacks, water hyacinth is considered as one of the potential agricultural wastes in Indonesia that can be processed into an alternative solid fuel. Carbonization followed by briquetting is one of the methods that can be applied to process biomass into solid fuels. This work investigated the effect of carbonization temperature and two different types of binders on combustion characteristic of water hyacinth biomass. In this work, carbonization was carried out at three different temperatures, i.e. 350oC, 400oC and 450oC, while comparing the application of two types of binders, which were tapioca gel and polyvinyl acetate (PVAc) adhesive. The results showed that carbonization process of water hyacinth increased the fixed carbon content and the calorific value, and the best result was obtained at 450oC with tapioca gel as the binder. With this condition, the fixed carbon content in the biomass briquette could be increased up to 34.14% with a calorific value of 3,837 kcal/kg. Although the combustion efficiency was only 4.89%. The application of water hyacinth as biomass briquette has shown a promising alternative to reduce CO emission and the above-mentioned environment problems.