Proceedings of the International Conference on Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technology, 30-31 October 2018, BSD City, Indonesia, ISSN: 2477-1538 13 Preparation of Palm Fatty Acid Distillate (PFAD) As Raw Material for Bio Aviation Fuel Production Barry Wiethoff a* , Evita H. Legowo a , Diah I. Widiputri a Swiss German University, Tangerang Selatan, Indonesia E-mail: barry.wiethoff@gmx.de Abstract: Nowadays, aviation sector became one of the most important transportation in the world. The demand in this sector has increased rapidly over the last 10 years. Unfortunately, the increase of the demand leads to an increase of fuel consumption and CO2 emission in the aviation’s sector. Bio-based aviation fuel is believed to be one of the solution for the reduction of CO2 emission in the aviation’s sector. Palm Fatty Acid Distillate (PFAD) which is a by- product of palm oil refinery, contains a high amount of free fatty acids. The free fatty acids contained in the PFAD are able to be converted into straight hydrocarbon chain through decarboxylation process. This thesis conducted 3 different experiments to find out the best decarboxylation reaction’s condition to convert the FFA into straight chain hydrocarbons over an activated carbon catalyst. The experiments compared the results between the experiment with different reaction’s conditions and the presence of solvent in the reaction. The results have shown that the third experiment, which used heptane as solvent and hydrogen in argon gas as reaction’s environment, has the best reaction’s condition among others. Experiment 3 has converted 77.07% of the FFA, while experiment 2 and 1 only converted 58.37% and 16.30% respectively. Keywords: Bio aviation fuel, Palm Fatty Acid Distillate, Decarboxylation, Activated Carbon, Free Fatty Acid. 1. Introduction Air transportation is now one of the most important transportation modes, since it can transport a lot of passengers and it only takes a relatively short time to travel thousands of kilometre around the globe. In 2016 there were 3.696 billion passengers that travelled by air (The Worldbank 2017). Like any other transportation modes, air transportation needs energy to power the engines. Petroleum based jet fuel is used to power the engines of the aircraft. In 2015, the world aviation sector consumed around 278,894 tonnes of fuel (International Energy Agency 2017). This lead to a serious problem, since the availability of fossil fuel is depleting. The consumption of fossil fuels also leads to a high amount of carbon dioxide emissions. Worldwide, the aviation sector produced around 781 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in 2015. In order to reduce the emissions, the air transport industry developed a set of environmental targets, which is to reduce the net emission from aviation by 50% by 2015, compared to the emission level in 2005 (Commission et al. 2015). One of the ways to reduce the emission is by blending the aviation’s fuel with bio based aviation fuel. Until now there are several bio-based aviation fuel sources that are already used as a blending for the aviation fuel. The available bio based aviation fuel source are Jatropha, algae, and waste cooking oil. Palm oil may also possible to be one of the alternative bio fuel sources that can be converted into bio- aviation fuel. Fuel generation from palm oil, which is mainly used in biodiesel production, palm oil is refined to remove the fatty acids content. The physical refinery process of palm oil produces Palm Fatty Acid Distillate (PFAD) as a by-product. Nowadays, PFAD is utilized as a raw material for detergent and soap due to the high Free Fatty Acid (FFA) content.