Pilot Plant of Crumb Rubber from Natural Latex: Evaluating and Improving Process Performance

• Main Author: NUGROHO (NIM : 13014033) - WARMAN RAMADHAN (NIM : 13014036), FERI
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/27298
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

<p align="justify"> Production process of crumb rubber from natural latex, by new method, can be done by spray drying. Pilot plant of crumb rubber production from natural latex using spray dryer has been constructed successfully in the previous research, and its summary gives optimum operating condition which is 150oC of air dryer temperature and 80%-m/m of water contained in natural latex feed. Pilot plant of crumb rubber production has not been able to operate in a long period of time and unstable. The latex blocking is the main problem faced. This research aims to evaluate and to increase spray dryer performance in increasing durability and stability of production. <br /> <br /> The research steps are understanding the equipment used in the previous research, collecting data of operation parameters from the previous research, analyzing the limitation of the previous research, analyzing improvements which will be done especially improving the burner, verifying the new design of the burner, constructing Spray Dryer, evaluating pump and nozzle used, testing the spray drier simultaneously, and characterizing of the crumb rubber produced. The new burner of Spray Dryer is tested by comparing the performs, the heating speed, and the efficiency of the new one to the old one. The Spray Dryer operating simultaneously is tested by using operating condition got from the previous research, without doing any new variations, such as air dryer temperature 150oC with and the natural latex which contains 80%-b/b of water. Evaluation and reparation also need to do by the pump and the nozzle to be more proper. <br /> <br /> The research result shows that the new designed burner has 53% of effieciency with 1.22 Nm3 of flowrate and the time of heating faster. The pump and piping system performance has upgrade ang can drain latex better. Nozzle has changed to bigger diameter and be equipped with coller stream water with isolator from PTFE to prevent heat accumulation on nozzle.Water cooler flow is 14 mL/s. Spraying process works well. <p align="justify"> <br /> <br />