Soil Enhancement Material using Palm Oil Ashes (POA) for Grounding Purposes

Abstract

In this study, we present our work on the application of palm oil ashes (POA) as backfill to be used in an earth grounding grid system. The backfill is implemented while considering certain high soil resistances in certain areas. In this project, we used POA as material as well as copper tape, aluminum tape, and galvanized steel as microgrids. The size of the microgrid is 1 square meter and is buried 1 meter into the ground. Two microgrids of each conductor type were assembled. One of the microgrids was installed with the POA as backfill and the other without backfill as a reference point. Fall-of-potential was used to measure soil resistance. The data collected show that the galvanized microgrid added with POA produced the best result with an improvement of almost 17%–23% compared with its reference point. This is followed by copper microgrid with almost 9%–13% improvement. Meanwhile, the aluminum microgrid had the worst performance with a resistance increment of just 1%–3%.