Investigation of particle level kinetic modeling for babul wood pyrolysis

To design a large-scale pyrolysis reactor, a complete particle level model was developed using pyrolysis of babul wood. Babul wood, the abundant woody biomass in India, is a highly reactive and promising feedstock for pyrolysis and considered as a case study in the present work. Thermo-balance was used to devolatilize the wood particles at different heating rates from (10 to 20 K min−1), thereby estimate the intrinsic kinetics parameters. Non-condensable gases released from wood pyrolysis were also modeled and derived the kinetic parameters. Large wood single particle dimension of L/D ∼3.5 was chosen to investigate the pyrolysis reaction and developed a particle level model which involves both heat transfer and chemical reactions phenomena. Particle model developed was simulated with intrinsic kinetic parameters generated from kinetic models. Two-step consecutive model with different reaction orders (m = 1, n = 2) was found to explain the experimental data very well. Additionally, optimum conditions for maximum product yields and detail characterization of bio-oil was carried out using different analytical techniques.