Advanced Fire Cakes- A Potential Source of Bioenergy from Unusable Biomass for the Solution of Energy Crises

Present scenario indicates the drastic future in connection with energy. Majority non-conventional energy sources are getting depleted very rapidly. In this scenario, it is necessary to develop eco-friendly clean energy sources by using available biomass as solution for energy crises. In present investigation the efforts are taken to synthesize the composite material by adding cattle dung and coconut shells. Traditionally cattle dung is used from centuries to synthesize the dung cake to use in chulhas and shegadis to complete the need of fuel, coconut shells are available in very small quantity and thrown away in garbage pits by considering them as useless biomass. Thus by modifying the traditional dung cake in the well engineered formulation by using dung and pieces of coconut shell results this composite biomass source. Three samples were synthesized, First of pure dung, and other are dung and coconut shell in different V/V ratio. The synthesized modified dung cakes were observed to be used to heat water in chulhas and get the results. Sample III shows maximum efficiency with smokeless energy out of all the samples.