Investigation of Bio-Waste As Alternative Fuel For Cooking

Nigeria has a vast natural resources especially forestland with the majority of its households relying on solid biomass such as charcoal and firewood as their cooking fuels. Combustion of solid biomass is a significant source of particulate and carbon monoxide emissions. However, the increasing demand and use of charcoal and firewood has led to an escalation of deforestation and the emission from the combustion of these fuels have been highly correlated to harmful health effect among other related problems. Bio-waste as an alternative fuel for cooking in Nigeria is still in its infancy and hence the need for this research. The research was carried out using binders (starch and spent oil) and biomass (rice husk and sawdust) to produce Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) often referred to as pellets. Properties such as moisture content (%), ash content (%), tensile strength (N/mm) and higher heating value (kJ/kg) were determined for the RDF. Prior to the production of the RDF, the moisture and ash contents of rice husk and sawdust were 5.72% and 17.14%, and 15% and 10.23%, respectively. After the production of the RDF from rice husk, moisture content, ash content, higher heating value, and tensile strength of 0.908%, 11.5%, 6160.7 kJ/kg and 508.7 N/mm2 of tensile strength, respectively, were obtained. Also, for the RDF produced from sawdust, moisture content of 0.93%, ash content of 16.5%, higher heating of 7808.1 kJ/kg and tensile strength of 576.8 N/mm2 were measured. These results were found to be in agreement with previous studies on RDFs sourced from bio-wastes. Conclusively, the RDF seems to be a good substitute to wood as cooking fuel and would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thus save our environment from effects of climate change