Agricultural waste such as oil palm empty fruit bunch (EFB) is of environmental concern to Malaysia as one of the world's largest oil palm producers. Pyrolysis can be used to treat biomass waste due to its flexibility in producing solid, liquid and gas products. This study attempts to characterize EFB for pyrolysis using microwaves as an alternative heating source. EFB taken from a local oil palm mill was subjected to fuel, chemical and dielectric property analysis. The findings revealed that high moisture and 47% oxygen gave low calorific value of 16 MJ/kg. Notably, high water content is an advantage in microwave heating as water is a good microwave absorber, which results in fast drying. Further, a high volatile content at 70% gave the EFB an advantage of high reactivity. A moderate potassium content of 12.8% could also positively affect microwave absorption. The dielectric properties of EFB were observed to be proportional to the moisture content. Furthermore, the microwave penetration depth was found highest at 20% moisture, i.e. 3.5 cm. However, low values of both dielectric constant and loss of dried EFBs would require the addition of microwave absorbers for pyrolysis reaction. The fuel and chemical characteristics of EFB were found comparable to other biomasses, which indicated a good candidate for microwave pyrolysis treatment.

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An open-ended coaxial sensor for the determination of complex permittivity and moisture content of oil palm fruits is presented in this paper. The measurement system consisting of the sensor and a PC-controlled vector network analyzer have been tested successfully on a range of oil palm fruits of various degrees of ripeness. The initial values of the complex permittivity were estimated using the admittance model of the sensor. The amount of moisture content was found by matching the values of permittivity from the quasistatic model with the permittivity of a dielectric mixture model using the moisture content values obtained from the standard oven drying method.

This paper describes the development of a low cost coaxial moisture sensor for the determination of moisture content (30 % to 80 % wet-weight basis) of the oil palm fruits of various degree of fruit ripeness. The sensor operating between 1 GHz and 5 GHz was fabricated from an inexpensive 4.1 mm outer diameter SMA coaxial stub contact panel which is suitable for single fruit measurement. The measurement system consists of the sensor and a PC-controlled vector network analyzer (VNA). The actual moisture content was determined by standard oven drying method and compared with predicted value of fruit moisture content obtained using the studied sensor. The sensor was used to monitor fruit ripeness based on the measurement of the phase or magnitude of reflection coefficient and the dielectric measurement software was developed to control and acquire data from the VNA using Agilent VEE. This software was used to calculate the complex relative permittivity from the measured reflection coefficient between 1GHz and 5 GHz.