Plant Design for a Production Process of Nanoasphalt Emulsion from Asbuton Rock

Abstract

The largest deposit of natural asphalt in the world is located on Buton Island, Indonesia, which is around 677 million tons. With such abundance, Indonesia should be able to supply domestic asphalt needs, even has the potential to export abroad. However, the asphalt industries in Indonesia have not been able to process effectively the natural asphalt from Asbuton rock into a better quality of asphalt. Generally, they only focuses on resizing and separating the Asbuton rock according to the specifications of filler. This situation causes Indonesia has to import asphalt from abroad. Several studies and experiments have been done previously in lab-scale to produce high yield of nanoasphalt from Asbuton by combining microemulsion technique and Ultrasonication. Here we present a conceptual plant design of nanoasphalt production to process 121.8 tons/day of Asbuton rock as the raw material and produce 190 ton/day of nanoasphalt. The economic feasibility of processes of the Plant Design is analyzed. The economic evaluation in this work involves analyzing the capital and operating costs of the process to determine the return on investment (ROI), Break Even Point (BEP), Payback Period (PP), Internal Rate of Return (IRR).  The result shows that the production of nanoasphalt is relative economical with ROI, BEP, PP and IRR are 31.54%, 24.5%, 2.47%, 35.46%, respectively.