Philippine E-Journals

Yield Potential of Rain Tree (Samanea Saman Merr.) as Feedstock for Biofuel Production

Samuel R. Simon

Discipline: Education, Technology, Research

 

Abstract:

This study was conducted to determine the ethanol yield potential of rain tree and to evaluate its potentials as a feedstock for biofuel production. Ripe rain tree fruits were fermented using baker’s yeast with the following treatments: T1-fermentation of the whole fruit pods; T2–fermentation of the fruit with the seeds removed and T3–fermentation of the filtered solution only (solid particles consisting of pulp, bark and seeds were removed). One (1) kg of fruit for each replication was used and was fermented for 10 days in a six-gallon water container. Result of this study reveals that using the basis that fifty percent (50%) of the measured sugar level is converted into ethanol (Mathewson, SW and Franco, S. 2009), T1 has the highest yield potential of 210 ml/kg the highest average ethanol yield. Based on the alcohol content analysis of the fermented solution the highest ethanol yield was obtained by T1 (180 ml/kg), followed by T2 (177 ml/kg) while T3 (162 ml/kg) obtained the lowest ethanol yield among the treatments.. Moreover, based on the alcohol analysis of the distillate, T1 (117.03 ml/kg) obtained the highest average ethanol yield followed by T2 (116.40 ml/kg) while T3 (90.23 ml/kg) obtained the lowest. Analysis of variance reveals that there is a significant difference among the treatments at 5 percent level of significance. Comparison of the yield of rain tree (210 liters/ton) with the yield of other feedstocks reveals that the rain tree fruit is a very good feedstock for biofuel production and recommends that optimization studies should be conducted in all aspects of fruit processing, from particle size reduction to fermentation and distillation, for maximum and economical bio-ethanol production.