Investigation on thermal and kinetic characteristics during co-pyrolysis of coal and lignocellulosic agricultural residue

Co-utilization of coal and lignocellulosic biomass has the potential to reduce greenhouse gases emission from energy production. As a fundamental step of typically thermochemical co-utilization (e.g., co-combustion, co-gasification), co-pyrolysis of coal and lignocellulosic biomass has remarkable effect on the conversation of the further step. Thermal behavior and kinetic analysis are prerequisite for predicting co-pyrolysis performance and modeling co-gasification and co-combustion processes. In this paper, co-pyrolysis behavior of a Chinese bituminous coal blended with lignocellulosic agricultural residue (wheat straw collected from north of China) and model compound (cellulose) were explored via thermogravimetric analyzer. Bituminous coal and lignocellulosic agricultural residue were heated from ambient temperature to 900 °C under different heating rates (10, 20, 40 °C·min^-1) with various mass mixing ratios (coal/lignocellulosic agricultural residue ratios of 100, 75/25, 50/50, 25/75 and 0). Activation energy were calculate via iso-conversional method (eg. Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose, Flynn-Wall-Ozawa and Starink methods). The results indicated that pyrolysis rate of coal was accelerated by wheat straw under all mixing conditions. Cellulose promoted the pyrolysis rate of coal under equal or lesser than 50% mass ratio. Some signs about positive or passive synergistic effect were found in char yield. Char yields were lower than that calculated from individual samples for bituminous coal and wheat straw. With the increasing of cellulose mass ratio, the positive synergies on char yields were reduced, resulting in passive synergistic effect especially under higher coal/cellulose mass ratio (25/75). Nonlinearity performance was observed from the distribution of activation energy.