©R. Bourdeix, 2021, section CCSC.
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Due to its high heating capacity, coconut charcoal is widely
used for barbecue as a alternative for normal coal. Many food producers now
tend to use coconut charcoal for prepare traditional foods and barbecues.
Due to moisturizer and purification qualities, coconut charcoal is also used to create soaps and natural teeth whitener.
Recent research showed that the livestock that have had charcoal added to their feed has increased the milk production rates. For pigs its use to increase the weights of it and able to reduce the diseases.
Coconut charcoal is used to laid with sand as another
biomass material, before the grass are get planted. This get a good quality
grass and most of global golf courses developers are now using this technology.
There are basically 6 steps to prepare coconut
shell charcoal:
1. Collecting.
The production of coconut shell charcoal begins with the process of collecting
coconut shells from various sources, especially among coconut milk production
activities.
2. Drying. Usually
coconut shells are dried so they will directly to be processed into coconut
shell charcoal. If the coconut shell is wet or damp, the Charcoal Vendor's will
first dry under the sun.
3. Carbonisation.
To convert coconut shell into coconut shell charcoal, the chemical process
involved is carbonisation. The ideal temperature to convert coconut shell into
a coconut shell charcoal is from 450 °C to 55O °C. There are 2 approaches to
carbonisation, the direct method and the indirect method.
- Direct methods are like using drum kiln, brick kiln and pit kiln. With these method, after all the shells are burned into the charcoal. Then, the kiln will be closed to prevent the presence of oxygen from continue burning the charcoal to ash. The best thing about these method is that the setup costs are relatively lower.
- The indirect method is like using a retort of brick or steel. Retort can be operate batch by batch or continuously. The best thing about this method is that the fuel used is syngas that was generated from coconut shell biomass itself during the carbonisation process and the setup cost was very high.
4. Cooling. All
prepared charcoal will be cooled naturally without watering. This is to ensure
that the charcoal produced does not contain unacceptable levels of moisture.
5. Screening.
All the charcoal that is ready goes through the filtering process. This is to
ensure that the charcoal is clean from any impurities such as incomplete
carbonisation, husk charcoal, foreign matter such as stone, wood, iron and
various wastes. After this screening, we will get high premium quality charcoal
with below specifications:
- High Fixed Carbon — Min 72%
- Moisture Content — Max 10%
- Ash Content — Max 3%
- Volatile Matter — Max 15%
- Calorific Value — Above 7000 Kca//Kg
6. Packing and
Labelling
