Engineering HDR Seminar Series (No.20, 2015)

Wed, 25 March, 12:30pm – 1:30pm

Room 5422

"Integrated Approach for Cell Disruption and Recovery of Intracellular Recombinant Protein by using Alcohol-Salt Based Aqueous Two-Phase System (ATPS)"

Presenter: Mr Teh Chee Yang , postgraduate students of Chemical Discipline , School of Engineering, Monash University Malaysia

Palm oil industry in Malaysia has grown rapidly over the years, putting the country as one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of palm oil and its product. However, this industry has also been identified as the single largest source of water pollution source due to the discharge of palm oil mill effluent (POME) into the rivers. Present study focuses on combining coagulation-flocculation and heterogeneous photocatalytic processes as a potential alternative to conventionally used ponding system to treat POME. For coagulation-flocculation pretreatment of POME, our work focused towards demonstrating the performance of a natural-plant-based material, namely rice starch as a more effective and environmentally friendly substitute to the conventionally used alum coagulant. It was demonstrated that the use of rice starch alone could achieve similar removal efficiencies as compared to alum using the recommended treatment conditions. As for heterogeneous photocatalytic process, nitrogen, chlorine-codoped TiO2 (N,Cl-codoped TiO¬2) was firstly synthesized via a facile sonochemical procedure before its application to treat the pretreated POME. It was observed that the physicochemical properties and photocatalytic activity of the synthesized photocatalyst greatly depended on the synthesis conditions, namely, ultrasonic intensity, sonication duration dopant ratio and calcination temperature. Finally, the synthesized N,Cl-codoped TiO2 was tested on the degradation of pretreated POME and treatment parameters such as initial pH, catalyst loading, light intensity and presence of additives (eg. H2O2, S2O82-) were investigated. This study is expected to provide palm oil mill industries worldwide with a “greener” POME treatment alternative to meet discharge limits imposed by state environmental regulators.

Contact details: Wan Nurul Rukiah Wan Rasdi wan.nurul@monash.edu@eng.monash.edu.my Tel: 03-55146224