Increasing CO2 gasification rates of longan-seed char by a technique of char pre-oxidation

Abstract

A simple and effective technique was presented to increase the longan-seed char gasification rate during CO2 activation by pre-oxidizing the char with air. The kinetics of char gasification was studied in a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA) for the temperatures of 850–950 °C for char samples being oxidized in a tube furnace at the temperatures of 250, 280, and 300 °C. It was found that the gasification rate of the oxidized char was about twice higher than that of the non-oxidized char. The increase in the char reactivity for CO2 gasification is due to the increasing number of reaction sites caused by the disruption of functional group bonding created during the oxidation step. Additionally, the increase in the oxidation temperature gave rise to the increase in the char reactivity but the maximum temperature was limited by the ignition temperature of the longan-seed char. Four gasification kinetic models were tested against the experimental rate data and it was discovered that the modified volume reaction model (MVRM) provided the best description of the gasification conversion. The pre-exponential factor and the activation energy of the gasification reaction were determined from the Arrhenius equation. The estimated activation energy was found to be in the range of 156.87–218.98 kJ/mol and decreased with the increase of char oxidation temperature.