Three students from the ITS Department of Chemistry namely (from left) Sarazen Salahuddin Akbar, Irma Fitriani, and Immanuel Nathanael Lumban Gaol after successfully achieving achievements

ITS Campus, ITS News – Seeing the potential of biogas from palm oil waste, three students from the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Data Analytics (FSAD) Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS) initiated hybrid membrane technology innovations for biogas processing in Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) waste ). This innovation eventually resulted in winning first place in the 2023 Chemistry Fun Days (CFD) Student Scientific Writing Competition (LKTIM) at Padjadjaran University, Bandung, last Saturday (27/5).

This team consists of Sarazen Salahuddin Akbar, Immanuel Nathanael Lumban Gaol, and Irma Fitriani. They realize that Indonesia as the world’s largest producer of palm oil has the potential to utilize and process palm oil waste into renewable energy, one of which is POME waste. “Through the anaerobic process, this POME waste can be processed into biogas,” explained Sarazen, Head of the LKTIM CFD 2023 Team from ITS.

Furthermore, Sarazen said that POME waste contains gases such as methane, carbon dioxide, and so on. However, to produce quality biogas, the main component needed is methane gas. The presence of carbon dioxide gas in biogas has negative implications, namely reducing the heating value of combustion which should have reached 9,100 calories per cubic meter to 4,800 calories per cubic meter.

Illustration of the process of separating methane and carbon dioxide using Mixed Matrix Membrane (MMM) technology

To overcome this problem, Sarazen and his team innovated a hybrid membrane technology, namely Mixed Matrix Membrane (MMM) based on polysulfone polymer with zif-8 composite material. “With this technology, the gas components of carbon dioxide and methane in biogas from POME waste can be separated by up to 99.99 percent,” said the 2019 batch student.

The use of this hybrid membrane technology is a combination of organic and inorganic membranes. This merger aims to produce better performance. The advantages possessed by this hybrid membrane technology include optimal separation performance, good stability, good mechanical strength, affordable price, and easy to apply.

Because this innovation uses a theoretical and systematic approach, Sarazen said, the challenge in making this innovation is to review several theories and literature studies, as well as collect data that takes a short time. Finally, this young man from Malang hopes that the results of Scientific Writing (KTI) can be subjected to laboratory tests to compare and validate the results and ideas in this KTI. (ITS Public Relation)

Reporter: Muhammad Aulia Zikra