I am Ranjeet Kumar Mishra from India. I am working on a kinetic analysis of biomass. I would like to know What is the inference from the reactive index during kinetic analysis of biomass.
Dear Ranjeet, the study of kinetics is, in fact, the study of reactivity. Now, how can you index the reactivity and study the inference? requires detailed explanation. In reality, biomass is a complicated embedding of various constituents, with different proportions and not to forget the pyrolytic conditions used. There are many constituting compounds (both organic and inorganic), different chain lengths and their behaviour towards thermal degradations are quite different and influenced by many factors. In other words, the constituents show different reactivities during pyrolytic conversion. These reactivties can be grouped on the basis of temperature. You may find in the literature the term 'pseudo-component' where compounds degrading in narrow temperature range are grouped together. You can have a look at the DTG curve preferably at a very low heating rate (5C/min or even lower is better) and identify them, if required you can also deconvolute these pseudos (overlapping pseudos). The shape of the peaks (height, width etc..) indicates their pyrolytic behaviour. You can then separate these and compare in terms of activation energy, pre-exponential coefficient and reaction model. I will refer you to the following research papers for more details