A study of the pyrolysis of rice husk through TG-MS analyses and lumped kinetic modelling: evidence of the non-interacting chemistry of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin macro constituents

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Describing the pyrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass is challenging due to its complex heterogeneous structure, and a key question is whether its behaviour can be reconstructed from the additive contributions of the main constituents (cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin). In this work, rice husk pyrolysis was investigated in a thermogravimetric–based setup, with integrated analysis of devolatilization kinetics, gaseous product evolution and bio-oil speciation. Rice husk composition in terms of macro-constituents was determined via quantitative fractionation, with detailed hemicellulose monosaccharide distribution. Rice husk behaviour was then reconstructed through additive combination of single experimental datasets of five reference constituents (cellulose, xylan, glucomannan, arabinoxylan, lignin). The surrogate reconstruction successfully reproduced devolatilization features and product yields, in agreement with predictions from CRECK-S lumped kinetic model. Overall, this study demonstrates the validity of additive approaches for rice husk pyrolysis, showing that single-constituent datasets and lumped models can be effectively combined to predict the behaviour of real biomass.