Synthesis of thermal insulator using chicken feather fibre in starch-clay nanocomposites.

Incorporating chicken feather fibre (CFF) into natural based-nanocomposite comprising of glycerine plasticized-cassava starch binder with bentonite (BNT) as nanofiller, a thermal insulator (TIN) was synthesized. Central Composite Design (CCD) Response Surface Methodology was employed to carry out the experimental design using two factors (CFF and BNT) along with one response (thermal conductivity) to produce nine materials as insulators, comprising of 0%, 5%, and 10% BNT based on 8 g initial weight of CFF. A sample without CFF was used as the control. Developed thermal insulators were subjected to thermal conductivity tests using Lee's disc method at a steady state. The best insulator is TIN-4 with the lowest thermal conductivity of 0.0313 W/(mK) and the highest insulation property of 114.63 m2k/W, while TIN-10 with no CFF has the highest thermal conductivity of 0.0549 W/(mk) and lowest insulation property of 48.1603 m2k/W. Proportionate use of chicken feather fibre in starch-clay nanocomposite will help synthesize an effective thermal insulator with minimum cost.

Experimental dataset investigating the effect of temperature in the presence or absence of catalysts on the pyrolysis of plantain and yam peels for bio-oil production.

More than 1.3 billion tons, a third of the total food produced, is wasted annually, and it has been predicted to increase in the coming years. Food waste significantly contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting in the release of about 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 into the environment yearly. Hence this large amount of wastes, with adverse environmental effects, needs to be appropriately managed. New technologies such as Anaerobic digestion, fermentation, and gasification are being used to produce renewable energy, which in turn reduces the increasing level of food wastes in the environment. Pyrolysis of biomass materials or food wastes produces high-value energy products or bio-oil that can possibly replace non-renewable fossil fuels when it is upgraded. In this study, pyrolysis (thermal treatment in the absence of oxygen) of plantain and yam peels to produce bio-oil, was investigated. The pyrolysis conditions, wide temperature ranges at an interval of 100 °C (200-700 °C), absence of a catalyst (AOC), the use of zeolite -Y catalyst using two separate heterogeneous catalysis procedures were imposed and used to produced bio-oil. In the first procedure, the pyrolysis gases were allowed to rise through a zeolite-Y catalyst bed (HTC). And in the second procedure, the plantain or yam peel feedstock was first mixed uniformly with the zeolite-Y catalyst before pyrolysis (HMC). The GC-MS machine was used to analyze or characterize the obtained bio-oil while proximate analysis and XRF machine were used to characterize the plantain and yam peels feed. The residue, biochar, from the pyrolysis process, was also characterized using the XRF machine.