OPTIMIZATION OF CARBON NANOTUBES PRODUCTION FROM PALM OIL WASTE AS SUPERCAPASITOR ELECTRODE

• Main Author: Furqon Nugraha, Nurizal
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/42558
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Indonesia is one of the largest palm oil producers in the world with 31 million tons per year of capacity. Huge waste has been produced as a result of its capacity such as palm oil waste or POME. POME characterization is advantageous due to high carbon source and it can be used widely for biogas production. In addition, POME can be used also as raw material for carbon nanotubes (CNT) manufacture. CNTs are cylindrical nanocarbons with high electrical conductivity and low density. The CNT application is widely used as an energy storage medium such as electrode material in commercial supercapacitors which produces a specific capacitance reaching 79.57F.g-1. KPEE-ITB Laboratory succeeded to produce CNT from POME by pyrolysis. However, the yield of CNT is still low and the capacitance of supercapacitor does not meet commercial standards. The study will investigate how to increase production of CNT by adding three times amount of raw materials and utilization of CNT collecting system made by stainless steel mesh at the end of the tubular furnace. In addition, to increase capacitance of symmetrical supercapacitors, wettability enhancement using wet mechanochemical ball mill (WMBM) method and wet mechanochemical sonicaton (WMSO) will be applied. Variation of separator (sulfonated tetrafluoroethylene and filter paper) were carried out to determine the effect of separator type on specific capacitance. Increasing of raw material amount and utilization of stainless steel mesh-based collecting system can increase the yield of CNT from 0.46% to 0.96% (the maximum fix carbon yield was 2.94%). Specific capacitance of supercapacitor cells using filter paper and sulfonated tetrafluoroethylene separators were 3.14 and 14.42 F.g-1, respectively. Increment of CNT wettability using the WMBM and WMSO methods on supercapacitor cells obtained specific capacitances of 36.48 and 16.39 F.g-1.