Kinetics of petroleum coke/biomass blends during co-gasification

The co-gasification behavior and synergistic effect of petroleum coke, biomass, and their blends were studied by thermogravimet-ric analysis under CO2 atmosphere at different heating rates. The isoconversional method was used to calculate the activation energy. The results showed that the gasification process occurred in two stages: pyrolysis and char gasification. A synergistic effect was observed in the char gasification stage. This effect was caused by alkali and alkaline earth metals in the biomass ash. Kinetics analysis showed that the acti-vation energy in the pyrolysis stage was less than that in the char gasification stage. In the char gasification stage, the activation energy was 129.1–177.8 kJ/mol for petroleum coke, whereas it was 120.3–150.5 kJ/mol for biomass. We also observed that the activation energy calcu-lated by the Flynn–Wall–Ozawa (FWO) method were larger than those calculated by the Kissinger–Akahira–Sunosen (KAS) method. When the conversion was 1.0, the activation energy was 106.2 kJ/mol when calculated by the KAS method, whereas it was 120.3 kJ/mol when cal-culated by the FWO method.