Development and Comparison of Thermodynamic Equilibrium and Kinetic Approaches for Biomass Pyrolysis Modeling

Abstract

Biomass pyrolysis is considered as a thermochemical conversion system that is performed under oxygen-depleted conditions. A large body of literature exists in which thermodynamic equilibrium (TE) and kinetic approaches have been applied to predict pyrolysis products. However, the reliability, accuracy and predictive power of both modeling approaches is an area of concern. To address these concerns, in this paper, two new simulation models based on the TE and kinetic approaches are developed using Aspen Plus, to analyze the performance of each approach. Subsequently, the results of two models are compared with modeling and experimental results available in the literature. The comparison shows that, on the one hand, the performance of the TE approach is not satisfactory and cannot be used as an effective way for pyrolysis modeling. On the other hand, the results generated by the new model based on the kinetic approach suggests that this approach is suitable for modeling biomass pyrolysis processes. Calculation of the root mean square error (RMS), to quantify the deviation of the model results from the experiment results, confirms that this kinetic model presents superior agreement with experimental data in comparison with other kinetic models in the literature. The acquired RMS for the developed kinetic method in this paper varies within the span of 1.2 to 3.2 depending on temperature (400–600 °C) and various feedstocks (pine spruce sawdust, bagasse, wood bark, beech wood and paddy straw).

Keywords

• biomass pyrolysis
• biochar production
• modeling
• thermodynamic equilibrium
• kinetic method