Pyrolysis kinetics of water hyacinth using thermogravimetric analysis

Abstract

: The global alarms of energy security and change of environment have prompted strong research in the field of renewable energy to lessen the impact of environmental effects and health hazard. The present study addresses with pyrolysis kinetics of water hyacinth using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The TGA analysis was conducted in the temperature range of 30 to 900 ᵒC with four heating programs (10, 15, 20 and 30 C/min). TGA result shows that the pyrolysis of water hyacinth is categorized by three different stages and most decomposition was observed in the 2nd pyrolysis stage. The activation energy in this study was determined using isoconversional method i.e. Flynn–Wall–Ozawa and the preexponential coefficient were calculated using Kissinger’s equation. From the analysis it was observed that the average value of activation energy of water hyacinth obtained as 238.75 kJ/mol in the conversion range of 0.1 – 0.8. With the increasing of heating rates, the pre-exponential coefficient was found to decreased and maximum value was obtained at α = 0.6.

Keywords

• Water hyacinth
• pyrolysis
• activation energy
• frequency factor