<![CDATA[Indonesia has potential sources for development of renewable fuels from agricultural wastes, one of which is corn cobs. Many researches have tried to convert corn cobs into a liquid fuel by pyrolysis, but the resulting bio-oil has a high oxygenate content, resulting in a low heating value. On the other hand, plastic waste has become a major problem for Indonesia, amounting to 5,4 million tons of waste per year. Around 16% of the total plastic waste is polypropylene, in which its high hydrogen/carbon ratio is an attractive hydrogen source for co-feeding with corn cobs in co-pyrolysis. Synergetic effect has been formed between the two, which has been proven to increase the yield and quality of the resulting bio-oil. Most co-pyrolysis process has been conducted with nitrogen as carrier gas. Its high price creates an economic barrier for commercial production of bio-fuel using co-pyrolysis method. It is proposed to substitute nitrogen with carbon dioxide. Beside of its low cost, carbon dioxide is known to have a heat-trapping effect, thus increasing the heat flux to particle feed during co-pyrolysis process. Three feed compositions during the process has been investigated to observe the effect of feed composition to the yield and quality of the non-polar (non-oxygenated) fraction of resulting bio-oil, which will be compared to commercial gasoline. Co-pyrolysis process was conducted in a stirred tank reactor with low heating rate of 5oC/min, maximum temperature of 500oC. Non-polar fraction of the resulting bio-oil has been characterized using GC-MS (gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy) and H-NMR (hydrogen-nuclear magnetic resonance). Bio-oil yield is lower compared to its counterpart when nitrogen is used as carrier gas, but H-NMR results shows that the non-polar fraction have a high branching index, low alkene and aromatic contents, which is potential to be used as a bio-fuel.]]>
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