Computation of biomass combustion characteristic and kinetic parameters by using thermogravimetric analysis

Abstract

In this study, the response surface methodology and simplex-lattice design were applied to investigate the effect of biomass constituents on the kinetics of biomass combustion, important information for process design. The synthetic biomass made from pure cellulose, xylan and Organosolv lignin was used instead of real biomass for this purpose. The combustion process was employed using thermogravimetric analyzer. The results obtained from three different kinetic models including Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose, Ozawa-Flynn-Wall and Analytical Method were provided and compared. According to the analysis of variances (ANOVA), the higher cellulose and hemicellulose fraction provided greater activation energy and frequency factor. The proposed regression models with high R2 coefficient indicated that the predicted kinetic values and experimental data agreed very well. The contour plots generated from the proposed models were also provided in this study. They were used to observe the influence of biomass components on each kinetic parameter.