Numerical analysis of new distributed activation energy model for the representation of biomass pyrolysis kinetics

AbstractThere are a considerable number of chemical reactions involved in biomass pyrolysis and many different models have been proposed for analysing biomass pyrolysis kinetics. The most accurate and up to date approach for kinetic description of biomass pyrolysis is to adopt the distributed activation energy model (DAEM). The conventional DAEM assumes the Gaussian distribution of activation energies and the same frequency factor for all parallel reactions. However, the Gaussian distribution cannot be directly used for the distribution of activation energies, and the uniform frequency factor approximation is not always valid especially for the initial and final stages of biomass pyrolysis process. In this paper, a new DAEM using a linear relationship between the natural logarithm of the frequency factor and the activation energy and a modified Gaussian distribution for the representation of biomass pyrolysis kinetics has been presented. To obtain the realistic values of the kinetic parameters, some numer...