Design and Fabrication of a Simple Laboratory Ball Mill for Powder Coconut Shell Preparation as Raw Material of Biochar

摘要

Biochar is one of the progressive material used for many application in pharmaceutical food,chemical and electrochemical industry.To manufacture the biochar,one of the main obstacle is derived from the preparation process and characteristics of the biochar source.Coconut shell is one of the abundant material usually used as biochar source.However,the coconut shell have a hard-shell which is practically is not easy to process it manually.Therefore,in this study we design and fabricate a simple and low cost ball mill.The goals of this research is to customize the coconut shell powder as technical grade for biochar source using a laboratory ball mill.The laboratory ball mill consist of a steel bowl,steel ball and a vibrator.The fabricated ball mill was tested to 1 mm,10 mm and 1-10 mm of coconut shell chips for three series of testing to evaluate the grinding capability and reproducibility.For 30 minutes of testing,the ball mill has produce the powder coconut shell about(26.07 + 1.2)%;(22.69 ± 1.58)% and(16.24 + 0.52)% respectively for 1 mm,10 mm and 1-10 mm of coconut shell chips.The high reproducibility of the ball mill show that it has potential for powder coconut shell preparation machine.