Hydrophilic and hydrophobic characteristics of dry peat

Indonesia is a country with the largest peatland in Southeast Asia. These vast peatland is spread throughout the country. In the last 2 decades, Indonesia encounter land fires and now becomes an annual land fire event. Later, observed that the land fire occurred because dry season in Indonesia causing the peat becomes dried enough to have hydrophobic characteristics and easily burned. This fire phenomena on peatland is determined by some factor such as, physical properties, organic content, oxygen concentration, etc. Peat has hydrophilic and hydrophobic properties as physical properties when treated differently. Initially raw peat has hydrophilic properties. However, in certain low level of moisture content, peat becomes hydrophobic. To examine this phenomenon, mechanical understanding based experiment was done. For hydrophilicity, the experiment will be using Shimadzu MOC63u Moisture Balance Analyzer. The peat sample which are used are Indonesian natural peat. The wet peat was dried by using moisture balance equipment with various time (0.5 till 6 hours with interval 0.5h) at 100°C. and loading peat into a tube with 2.15 cm in inner diameter and 5.5 cm long where both end are covered by wire mesh. Afterwards, the tube was being dipped into water in a certain depth. As for hydrophobicity, the experiment was done with the same method as hydrophilicity by using some of the dried peat. From the experiment, the mass loss, adsorption time, volume shrinkage and adsorption capacity and as well as hydrophobicity of peat will be shown in the result.