Thermokinetic Characterization of Biomass Pyrolysis by Differential Scanning Calorimetry

Detailed knowledge of thermal conversion processes becomes increasingly important in order to formulate mathematical models for the design and optimization of chemical reactors employed in energy and chemicals recovery from biomass. Since heat of reaction has an important influence on the course of thermal conversion, the corresponding kinetic models should be coupled with heat transfer equations as an approach to the characterization of the whole phenomena. Although a substantial amount of information about thermal properties of some biomass, like wood, can be traced in the literature, few values have been reported for the heat of reaction of specific lignocellulosic materials (e. g. energy crops) and most of the thermal measurements have been affected by experimental conditions such as sample weight and presence of secondary reactions, or autocatalytic effects due to impurities.