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Burning fossil fuel like coal in power plants released carbon dioxide that had been absorbed millions of years ago. Unfortunately, excessive carbon dioxide emission had led to global warming. Malaysia, as one of the major exporters of palm oil, has abundant oil palm mill residues that could be converted into value-added product like biomass fuel briquettes. Fuel briquette with palm kernel shell and palm mesocarp fibre as its main ingredients showed satisfactory fuel characteristics and mechanical properties as a pure biomass fuel briquette. The effects of adding some coal of higher calorific value to the satisfactory biomass fuel briquette were focused in this study. Various coal-biomass fuel blends were used, ranging from 0wt% coal to 50wt% coal. The fuel properties and mechanical properties of pure biomass briquette and briquettes with different amount of coal added were compared experimentally. From the fuel properties tests, it was found that as the coal content in the briquette was increased, the carbon content and calorific value increased. Mechanical property tests on the fuel briquettes showed a mixture of results, with some favored higher portion of coal in the briquette for better handling, transport and storage properties while some favored greater amount of biomass.

In recent years, the Swirling Fluidized Bed has been regarded as one of the novel designs in fluidization technology. This new technique features an annular blade distributor which injects the fluidizing gas through a certain inclination, is capable of fluidizing the bed and at the same time causes swirling motion of particles in a circular trajectory. In the present work, the fluidization characteristics and hydrodynamics of a swirling bed are studied using an experimental approach. The behavior of gas-particle interaction in a swirling bed in terms of operation regimes, trend of pressure drop across the bed and the hysteresis effect, are explored with varying bed configurations. Seven sets of particles, three in spherical shape, two in cylindrical shape and two in irregular shape, are used as bed material by considering bed weights from 500 g to 2000 g and blade overlap angles 18° for air velocities up to approximately 3.5 m/s and blade inclination of 10°. The results evidently showed that particle configurations dramatically affect the beds’ behavior.