THERMOLYSIS AND KINETICS OF SCRAP TYRE AND BAGASSE FOR ENERGY UTILIZATION

Abstract

The increase of energy demand has brought concern to find alternative fuel that will atleast sustain the requirement. Bagasse and scrap tyre are waste generated in our industrialactivities, which can be used in energy production to subsidize the demand. This paper, aimto study the decomposition behaviour and kinetics of biomass (bagasse) and scrap tyre aspreliminary stage of fuel sample analysis to be considered for energy production ingasification/combustion or pyrolysis facilities. The behaviour demonstrated withthermogravimetric analyzer (TGA), shows that all samples have high volatile amountrelease, 84.21% for bagasse and 85.08% for scrap tyre, which means all are suitable forpyrolysis. However, scrap tyre is most suitable for gasification or combustion due to itshigh energy content, high ash content and low moisture than bagasse. The determinedkinetic parameter were activation energy (E) and pre-exponential factor (A) forhemicellulose/oil as first release composite and cellulose/elastomer as second composite ofthe analyzed bagasse/scrap tyre samples. The hemicelluloses of bagasse exhibited highestvalue of activation energy and pre-exponential factor (E=178.191 kJ/mol, andA=1.74×10 16 ) than oil of scrap tyre (E=41.113 kJ/mol, and A= 495.5), which meansbagasse is suitable candidate for gasification process due to high operating temperature.With this respect of the study, all candidates may be suitable for pyrolysis orgasification/combustion process. However, for environmental consideration scrap tyre isnot suitable due to high sulphur (S) and nitrogen (N) content resulting to high emission ofSO X and NO X .