Study on the ignition behavior and kinetics of combustion of biomass

Understanding the combustion behavior of biomass is essential to plant design and production control. In this work, we used thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) to study milled straw samples of different particle sizes in atmospheres of nitrogen and air. The ignition temperature was found to be 350℃, and the results were found to be insensitive to the particle size, which ranged from 63 μm to 2000 μm. In addition, a furnace balance system was used to study the impacts of particle size on the combustion of biomass and compare with TGA results. The activation energies of combustion were determined to be 54.37 kJ mol-1 for straw pellets and 49.94 kJ mol-1 for the milled straw. Further calibration of the furnace-balance system will be carried out in future to obtain more precise and reliable results for biomass fuel characterization.