Characterization of Malaysian Sewage Sludge Dried using Thermal Dryer

Abstract

The production of sewage sludge in Malaysia keeps increasing and the available solution for their disposal cannot cope the huge amount of sludge produced. Most of the treated sewage sludge from the sludge treatment plant in Malaysia were disposed by landfill. However, this disposal technique cannot sustain and harmful to the environment as well as to the human health. Thus, there is needed a new disposal method for treating sewage sludge that can sustain and environmentally friendly. Converting this waste into energy can resolve the disposal problem of sewage sludge and generate the new sources of energy to human kind. However, the moisture content is sewage sludge is high which is more than 85% of moisture content. In order to convert into energy, the small scale disc dryer was developed in order to reduce the moisture content of the sewage sludge which into acceptable level is less than 20% of moisture content for conversion into solid fuel. In this paper, the basic characteristic of the dried sewage sludge for conversion into energy was studied. Besides that, the initial moisture content of sewage sludge, the effect of inlet temperature and mass flow rate also recorded and analyzed. The result obtains for this dryer showed a positive result which produces 17.8% of moisture content of sewage sludge with a heating value of 16,036.21 kJ/kg which is acceptable for conversion into energy.