Estimation of beech pyrolysis kinetic parameters by Shuffled Complex Evolution

The pyrolysis kinetics of a typical biomass energy feedstock, beech, was investigated based on thermogravimetric analysis over a wide heating rate range from 5 K/min to 80 K/min. A three-component (corresponding to hemicellulose, cellulose and lignin) parallel decomposition reaction scheme was applied to describe the experimental data. The resulting kinetic reaction model was coupled to an evolutionary optimization algorithm (Shuffled Complex Evolution, SCE) to obtain model parameters. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study in which SCE has been used in the context of thermogravimetry. The kinetic parameters were simultaneously optimized against data for 10, 20 and 60 K/min heating rates, providing excellent fits to experimental data. Furthermore, it was shown that the optimized parameters were applicable to heating rates (5 and 80 K/min) beyond those used to generate them. Finally, the predicted results based on optimized parameters were contrasted with those based on the literature. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.