Conversion of Agricultural Waste Streams into Value Added Products
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MRS Advances © 2018 Materials Research Society DOI: 10.1557/adv.2018.232
Conversion of Agricultural Waste Streams into Value Added Products
Kofi W. Adu1, Paul Armstrong1, Lucas Servera1, David K. Essumang2 and Samuel Y. Mensah2 1
2
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, U. S. A.
University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana.
ABSTRACT
Much of the global agricultural by products go waste, especially in developing nations where much of their revenues depend on the exports of raw agricultural products. Such waste streams, if converted to “value added” products could serve as additional source of revenue while simultaneously having a positive impact on the socio-economic well being of the people. We present a preliminary investigation on utilizing chemical activation technique and ball milling to convert agricultural waste streams such as cocoa pod, coconut husk, palm midrib and calabash commonly found in Ghana into ultra-high surface area activated carbon. Such activated carbons are suitable for myriads of applications in environmental remediation, climate management, energy storage and conversion systems (batteries and supercapacitors), and improving crop productivity. We achieved BET surface area as high as ~ 3000 m2/g.
INTRODUTION Activated carbon (AC) has been shown to exhibit tunable porosity, large surface area, tunable surface chemistry, and high degree of surface reactivity making them ideal materials in a wide variety of applications in the food industry, climate management, environmental remediation, carbon sequestration, water filtration and improving crop productivity[1, and the ref therein] just to name a few. The global consumption of AC was expected to reach 2.3 million metric tons in 2017 [2]. To meet the ever increasing global demand, new low cost and environmentally benign and carbon neutral nontraditional sources such as agricultural waste streams/biomass that could achieve extremely high surface area and porosity are needed to replace traditional sources such as mineral carbons and lignocellulosics
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from wood. For instance, between 70 to 75 % of the weight of the cocoa fruit is the pod, i.e. per each metric ton of cocoa fruit, there will be between 700 to 750 kg of waste[3]. The projected cocoa beans production in 2017 from the top 8 cocoa producing countries (Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Indonesia, Ecuador, Cameroon, Nigeria, Brazil and Papua New Guinea) was expected to hit a record high of 4.2 million metric tons[4]. This indicates that between 11.8 million to 12.6 million metric tons of cocoa pod was generated as waste in 2017 alone. Conversion of even 25% of the waste into AC could meet the targeted global demand of 2.3 million metric tons[2]. Chemical activation and physical activation are the two main techniques used in the produc
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