Kinetic study on bamboo pyrolysis

Bamboo is an indigenous plant to many Asian countries; it is an extremely rapid growing plant, and with planned harvesting it can be produced as a sustainable raw material wood resource. The pyrolysis of bamboo has been studied to understand, model, and control the decomposition process as part of the overall process of producing activated carbons from bamboo. Different heating rates have been tested, and the pyrolysis mechanism has been modeled using the Runge-Kutta mechanism. The model has been applied assuming three-, four-, five-, and six-component reaction models. The best fit model, based on SSE values, is the six-component scheme using a Runge-Kutta solution methodology although the three-component reaction model correlates the data very well too. The basis for the selection of the six-component model is that each of the three main bamboo components, xylan, cellulose, and lignin, has one major decomposition step to volatiles and a minor decomposition to form char.