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 The paper is entitled “Effect of Chemical Composition on the Pyrolysis Kinetics of Lignocellulosic Biomass Using Surrogates” .  The paper introduces a numerical modelling procedure that deciphers the complicated thermochemical and thermophysical reaction kinetic and mass transfer processes responsible for the conversion of renewable lignocellulosic and municipal solid wastes into valuable chemical commodities, chemical energy carriers, or heat energy. Figuring out how to reuse municipal solid (household) wastes and lignocellulosic (plant matter) wastes are key challenges for a sustainable and low carbon society. The paper proposes a methodology to do this by approximating the composition of various lignocellulosic wastes as “surrogate” mixtures of simple chemically discrete monomers. With the assistance of MSSI Instrument Scientist Dr. Wynette Redington, the Thermal Gravimetry experimental facilities at the MSSI have been used to test the appropriateness of this principle. With the wastes deciphered from macroscopically defined “engineering” materials into microscopically defined “scientific” materials, their thermochemical reaction is modelled at the molecular level, providing new and detailed comprehension of the elementary processes. The paper was one of two contributions out of 476 submitted by 340 participants from 51 countries to receive best paper awards at the recent 6th International Conference on Waste Engineering & Biomass Valorisation at Albi France. The research is the result of a UL-NUIG collaboration between Dr. Karla Dussan, Dr. Rory Monaghan and Dr. Stephen Dooley funded by SFI, EPA, and IRCSET. The prize consists of €500 book vouchers for hungry minds!

Text taken from MSSI news. For more information, you can acess the related conference papers here and here.