Abstract
The macadamia tree is known for producing fruit high in fats, enclosed in very hard woody shells. Macadamia nut shell, considered as a by-product from macadamia nut processing, may be a suitable option for pyrolysis. These residues are constituted of cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin and extractives. The Independent Parallel Reaction (IPR) Model has been applied in this work to study the pyrolysis of macadamia nut shell from thermogravimetric experiments. The kinetic parameters and mass fraction of each component were estimated using the Differential Evolution Algorithm. The influence of the model parameters was also analyzed by means of sensitivity studies. The results showed that the decomposition of the macadamia nut shell is more sensitive to the parameters related to the decomposition of lignin. The results of sensitivity analysis also showed that the activation energy affects the total biomass conversion more strongly than the other parameters and the contribution of extractives in the IPR model is as important as the hemicellulose.
Keywords:
Macadamia nut shell; Biomass; Pyrolysis
