The 6th International Conference on Biomass Energy (ICBE2018)

353 / 2018-08-15 09:11:01

Pilot Scale and Kinetic Study on the Catalytic Co-pyrolysis of Corn Straw and Polypropylene

Plenary track > C. Liquid Biofuel

Biomass is an important part of renewable energy, which can help human to alleviate reliance on fossil energy source. Pyrolysis is an efficient and economical technology to convert biomass into usable bio-oil and valuable chemicals. Straw-like substances occupy a large share of biomass energy, and the production of corn straws ranks first in the production of various crop straws in China. To improve the resource utilization of corn straw, catalytic co-pyrolysis characteristics of corn straw and polypropylene (PP) were studied in this paper. Thermogravimetry Analysis (TGA) was used to study the mass loss and the kinetics parameters of the samples at different heating rates (10K/min, 20K/min, 30K/min). TG and DTG data shows that the addition of the catalyst (MCM-41) can advance the pyrolysis reaction of corn ctraw and PP, decrease the apparent activation energies of the blends and reduce the peak temperature of DTG curves. Pyrolysis–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (Py–GC–MS) was used to perform fast pyrolysis experiments and to obtain the selective products for different effective H/C ratio of the mixtures. A pilot-scale pyrolysis system with rotary reactor was used to calculate the mass and energy balance, and the distribution and characteristics of gaseous, liquid and solid products were discussed and analyzed in detail. Experiment results proved that the synergism between corn straw and PP pyrolysis processes is small when simply mixing them, after the catalyst (MCM-41) was added, the synergism between the two processes enhanced, and the oxygenated compounds were decreased, while the yield of aromatics and olefins increased greatly.