Keywords : rice husk, pyrolysis, char, NSMC
YC. Danarto dan Adrian Nur*)
LPPM UNS, DP2M, Strategi Nasional,2009
As agricultural countries, Indonesia has a great rice husk potential. One of alternative usage of rice husk is as a raw material for producing Nano Structural Supermicroporous Carbon (NSMC) as fuel gas adsorbent. Production of NSMC consisted two steps process, Step I was rice husk pyrolysis to produce char and Step II was char activation with KOH solution. The aim of this research was to study the effect of pyrolysis time upon char characteristic and to study the effect of KOH concentration upon NSMC characteristic. Pyrolysis process was conducted in reactor tank equipped with condenser with or without oxygen presence and with time variation 30 , 45, 60 dan 75 minutes. The amount of rice husk for pyrolysis process was 200 gr. Pyrolysis reached temperature till 600 oC. The activation process was conducted in stirred tank equipped with condenser. The amount of char for activation process was 50 gr and mixed with 150 ml KOH solution in variation I M, 2 M, and 3 M. Char from pyrolysis process and NSMC from activation process were analysis with FT-IR, BET, SEM and TEM. BET analysis showed that there was an increasing surface area with char activation process. The best surface area occurred at char activation process with 1 M KOH solutions which was 118,53 m2/gr. BET analysis also showed that the optimum time for pyrolysis process was 75 minutes. SEM and TEM images showed that there was nano structural carbon with average diameter 14,65 nm.