Processing thermogravimetric analysis data for isoconversional kinetic analysis of lignocellulosic biomass pyrolysis: Case study of corn stalk

Modeling of lignocellulosic biomass pyrolysis processes can be used to determine their key operating and design parameters. This requires significant amount of information about pyrolysis kinetic parameters, in particular the activation energy. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) is the most commonly used tool to obtain experimental kinetic data, and isoconversional kinetic analysis is the most effective way for processing TGA data to calculate effective activation energies for lignocellulosic biomass pyrolysis. This paper reviews the overall procedure of processing TGA data for isoconversional kinetic analysis of lignocellulosic biomass pyrolysis by using the Friedman isoconversional method. This includes the removal of “error” data points and dehydration stage from original TGA data, transformation of TGA data to conversion data, differentiation of conversion data and smoothing of derivative conversion data, interpolation of conversion and derivative conversion data, isoconversional calculations, and reconstruction of kinetic process. The detailed isoconversional kinetic analysis of TGA data obtained from the pyrolysis of corn stalk at five heating rates were presented. The results have shown that the effective activation energies of corn stalk pyrolysis vary from 148 to 473 kJ mol−1 when the conversion ranges from 0.05 to 0.85.