Chemical Kinetics Modeling on Bio-Oil Production from Pyrolysis of Sugarcane Bagasse

Biomass is a source of alternative energy that is environmentally friendly and very promising as one of the sources of renewable energy at present. The best candidate for the biomass waste for pyrolysis raw material is sugarcane bagasse. The sugarcane bagasse is a fibrous residue that is produced after crushing sugarcane for its extraction. Sugarcane bagasse is very potential to produce bio-oil through a pyrolysis process. The advantage of utilizing sugarcane bagasse is to reduce the amount of waste volume. Pyrolysis is a simple thermochemical conversion that transforms biomass with the near absence of absence of oxygen to produce fuel. Experiments were carried out on the fixed bed reactor. The analysis was carried out over a temperature range of 300-500 °C under atmospheric conditions. Products that are usually obtained from the pyrolysis process are bio-oil, char, and gas. Product analysis was performed using Gas Chromatography (GC) and Mass Spectrometry (MS) analysis. This research is aimed to study the kinetics of the sugarcane bagasse pyrolysis process to produce bio-oil. Three different models were proposed for the kinetic study and it was found that model III gave the best prediction on the calculation of pyrolysis process. From the calculation results, kinetic parameters which include activation energy (Ea) and the k factor (A) at a temperature of 300 °C is 2.4730 kJ/mol and 0.000335 s-1, at a temperature of 400 °C is 3, 2718 kJ/mol and 0.000563 s-1, and at a temperature of 500 °C is 4.8942 kJ/mol and 0.0009 s-1.