Month: February 2020

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. … Read more

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 … Read more

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, … Read more

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 … Read more

Vegetable oils like palm oil, being the triglycerides of fatty acids, have a number of excellent properties and can be used to produce valuable polymers. Many of us may not realize that we are surrounded by polymeric materials such as polyethylene, polypropylene and polyurethane (PU). The nature of PU foams and products depends very much on … Read more

Palm oil is widely used in many countries especially in industrial and small scale frying activities. In 2006, our country produced about 15.9 million tonnes of crude palm oil, mostly used in food applications, especially for frying. The used frying oil (UFO) is either regenerated back to food-grade oil or used in non-food applications. One of … Read more

Transparent soaps are a specialty product. They are also called glycerine soaps due to the incorporation of glycerine to confer transparency, enhance the appearance and ease the soap making process. Furthermore, it gives conditioning effects to the skin. ‘Transparent’ implies the property of light transmission without undue scattering, so that objects placed behind a transparent soap … Read more

Soap is the general name given to the products of the reaction between a fatty acid and an alkali. Fatty acids are obtained from triglycerides (fat or oil) of either animal or vegetable origin. In soap making, the fatty acids used are the C16-C18 and C12-C14 fractions as the soaps made from them have effi cient … Read more

Microemulsions are normally isotropic (clear), have very small droplets (~8-100 nm), low in viscosity and thermodynamically stable solutions. In contrast, the ordinary emulsions are milky white dispersions with higher viscosity, with droplets of >0.5 µm and only kinetically stable. Thus, the unique properties of microemulsions have generated great interest for use in high value products. Microemulsions … Read more

The productivity of conventional cultures in liquid media is limited due to the size of fl asks or shakers used. The MPOB Fast Transfer Technique (MoFaTT) (Tarmizi and Zaiton, 2005) allows cultures in less than 300 ml working volume of medium while the Two-in-One MPOB Simple Impeller (2-in-1 MoSLIM) and Simple Impeller with Fast Transfer Technique … Read more