Pyrolysis of petroleum pitches. 1. Non-isothermal kinetics

Abstract

The chemical composition and reactivity of petroleum pitches under non-isothermal thermogravimetric conditions were studied. Thermogravimetry (TG) was used to study pyrolysis of petroleum pitches. Non-isothermal thermogravimetric data were used to evaluate the kinetics of the pyrolysis of this carbonaceous material. The paper reports application of Ozawa–Flynn–Wall model to deal with non-isothermal TG data for the evaluation of the activation energy corresponding to the pyrolysis of two different petroleum pitches. Nonisothermal kinetic studies of pyrolysis of the pitches based on the TGA measurements at different heating rates resulted that the average activation energy of the pyrolysis of pitch B (213.2 kJ/mol) was higher than that of the average activation energy of pitch A (185.7 kJ/mol). The reaction orders of pitch A and pitch B were calculated to be 1.6 and 0.9, respectively. These calculated reaction orders were considered to be as second-order and first-order kinetics.