Thermal Decomposition of Biomass Wastes. A Kinetic Study

Abstract

Wastes from brewerys, industrial coffee roasting, and fiberboard furniture production were investigated. Thermogravimetric experiments were carried out with different types of temperature programs. Three models were proposed describing equally well the behavior of the samples. One of the models consisted of three partial reactions with distributed activation energies (DAEM). In this case 12 parameters were sufficient to describe the behavior of a sample in the entire range of observations. The other two models were mathematically simpler but contained higher numbers of adjustable parameters. The reliability of the models was tested in three ways: (i) the models provided good fit for all experiments; (ii) the evaluation of a narrower subset of the experiments resulted in approximately the same parameters as the evaluation of the whole series of experiments; and (iii) the models allowed accurate extrapolations to higher heating rates.