The palm oil industry generates vast amounts of biomass from its mills and plantations. Although some are used, most are largely wasted, particularly empty fruit bunches (EFB). EFB can be treated and used to make automotive parts. One such application is the production of damping sheets. Damping sheets are used to reduce noise, vibration and harshness […]

Each year, the oil palm industry produces more than 15 million cubic metre of oil palm trunks (OPT) during replanting. Despite their possible use as wood, the material is largely wasted. Some of the problems are a low recovery of sawn timber after seasoning, and the poor inherent physical and mechanical characteristics of the wood. […]

As detergents clean and strip natural oils out of fabric, clothes become scratchy and often develop a negative ionic charges (static cling), especially when they are dried in a dryer. In the early 1950s, when synthetic laundry detergents became popular, fabric softeners were introduced. The fi rst softeners were liquids to be added to laundry during […]

Over the last 10 years, MPOB, through its Advanced Oleochemical Technology Division, has put in much efforts to produce new palm-based polyols. The current MPOB palm oil polyol (POP), which can now be produced in pilot plant scale, can be formulated into various polyurethane (PU) foams rigid, semi-rigid and fl exible for use in the building, […]

Quaternized fatty acid triethanolamine esters or esterquats are cationic surfactants, nowadays preferred over the traditional quats because of their excellent biodegradability. The uniqueness of the esterquats molecule is due to the presence of at least one ester group between the long hydrocarbon chain and triethanolamine hydroxyl group (Figure 1). This ester linkage is easy to […]