Pyrolysis of furniture plant sawdust

Energy is the main concern in sustaining the development efforts in all aspects of human life. The main goal of the energy sector is to respond the energy requirements of the improved economy and increased population in a trustable, progressive and economical way continuously. For this reason, it is necessary to accelerate the investigations on the evaluation of local and renewable energy sources instead of the other sources based on the crude oil and natural gas. In this context, biomass is considered as an important alternative energy source to fosil fuels. Biomass has been recognized as a major world renewable energy source and municipal solid wastes can be used as biomass feedstock. In this study, furniture plant sawdust, which have been taken from a furniture plant of a capacity of 100 tons around Elazıg, choosen as an alternative energy source by considering the energy requirements of our country.In this study, pyrolysis of furniture plant sawdust has been conducted under various pyrolysis conditions. Experimental study was performed in two steps. The first step of the study, experiments were performed to investigate the effect of pyrolysis temperature, heating rate, pellet and particle size, residence time, kind of catalyst and the mixing ratio of catalyst-furniture plant sawdust, flow ratio of nitrogen on the product yields and composition.The maximum liquid yield of 57.16 % wt. was obtained for the furniture plant sawdust at pyrolysis temperature of 500 ºC. The maximum solid yield of 27.63 % wt. was obtained for the furniture plant sawdust at pyrolysis temperature of 500 ºC with NaOH catalyst. The maximum gaseous yield of 43.43 % wt. was obtained for the furniture plant sawdust at pyrolysis temperature of 700 ºC.The liquid product was characterized by FT-IR and the char was characterized with elemental analysis, proximate analysis, SEM, and FTIR techniques.The second step of the study, the pyrolysis study of furniture plant waste dusts is carried out under nitrogen flow rate of 10 ml/min. and heating rate of 10 ºC/min. between 25-900 ºC in TGA. As a result of the pyrolysis of waste dusts, three region were determined on thermographs. Regression constants for the different theorical model equations that representing degradation were calculated by Coast-Redfern method. And according to regression coefficients, kinetic model which the best representing degradation, was determined. In the study, the kinetic parameters were determined for the second and third decomposition steps, separately. Best model equations representing degradation for total reaction, second degradation step that hemicellulose and cellulose degraded, third degradation step that lignin degraded was found to be chemical kinetic F(3) equation, Ginstling- Brounshtein (D4) and Jander (D3) equations and chemical kinetic F(3) equation, respectively.By using best model equations representing degradation, activation energies and ln(A/min-1) were determined to be 77.54?82.32 kJ/mol and 10.45?11.60, respectively for second degradation step that hemicellulose and cellulose degraded and 52.40 kJ/mol and 5.07 same respectively for third degradation step that lignin degraded. Kinetic parameters were found to be 54.89 kJ/mol, 9.33 for the total reaction.As a result, it was determined that pyrolysis of furniture plant sawdust gives valuable liquid, solid products under proper conditions.Keywords: Furniture plant sawdust, pyrolysis, products yield, product characteristic