Our nation Nigeria is gifted and blessed with talents and many mineral resources, which includes crude oil, palm oil, clay and coal etc. some of these natural mineral are exported while some at times are refined for the purpose of foreign exchange. Nigeria being one of the developing countries, the dependence of the local industries nad factories on imported raw material is presently causing problem which results in the high standard of living and economic degradation.
Some of these mineral resources because they are crude or unrefined in the natural sense, they must be refined so that it will be fit for human consumption and industrial application.
For instance, palm oil processed from palm tree is refined to remove impurities and the yellowish red colour to make it suitable for human consumption. This project research is based on the rate of adsorption of red palm oil with bituminous coal.
Coal is a black combustible solid rich in carbon. It’s also contains variety of hydrocarbon, often traces of sulphur and moisture. It occurs buyers of seams in sedimentary areas. The depth at which coal seams are found varies enormously in some fields, seam layers are just below the surface. More often, they are buried beneath hundred of meters of rock. Coal was formed by the decomposition of the remains of plants and trees in swampy or river delta.
Coal can be classified according to rank, that is, according to the degree of metamorphosing in the series, which are mostly based on the carbon content of the coal substance. The ranks of coal are peat, lignite, bituminous and anthracite coal. Coal can be classified into four main division on appearance and properties.
Thus this work is specifically based on adsorption on a particular coal (bituminous coal) and red palm oil. Palm oil belong to the family of lipids which are compounds that are soluble in organic solvent (like alcohol, ester, chloroform) but insoluble in water. Palm oil is semi-liquid in nature and on standing separates into equal volumes of dark red fraction of high carotene content and a yellow semi-solved fraction. Palm oil can be processed into two ways (especially in Nigeria): the traditional and mechanical method, but because of amenability to mechanical method is widely employed in industrial processes, like wise in refining of palm oil where method of refining such as degrumming, deacidification, deodorization, bleaching, neutralization etc are employed.
The objective of this project research is to obtain the rate of adsorption of palm oil with bitumous coal (adsorbent). The refining of palm oil using bituminous coal at various time interval and temperature will be used to detect the extent of purity and colour change in natural palm oil. This involves the following steps: 1. the activation of coal and 2. adsorption process proper.