Kinetic study of the thermal decomposition of Lippia origanoides bagasse

Abstract

Combustion is the most widely used process to generate energy from biomass, however, there are still challenges to overcome in terms of efficiency and lack of knowledge of the properties of potential fuels. In the present work, a kinetic study of the thermal decomposition of Lippia origanoides bagasse from the essential oil distillation process is reported. Thermogravimetric analysis was performed on samples of stems, leaves and their mixture and the respective kinetic parameters were calculated from isoconversional methods of Friedman and Kissinger. The results obtained by the previous methods were evaluated by comparing the theoretical and experimental conversion curves, showing a good correlation between them, except for char combustion stage of leaves and mixture samples. Different characteristic combustion parameters were also evaluated; it was found that the stems samples have better combustion properties than the other two samples and that there is a linear relationship between them and heating rates.