COMPARATIVE STUDY OF VARIOUS APPROACHES IN ANALYSIS OF TGA DATA OF DEVOLATILIZATION OF HIGH ASH INDIAN COAL

Thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA) has been regularly employed for the estimation of devolatilization rates and measurement of char reactivity of coal. In general, TGA studies may be classified as isothermal or non-isothermal. In the first case temperature of the sample is kept constant whereas in case of latter the rate of temperature increase is kept constant. The current research work deals with the non-isothermal TGA study and kinetic analysis of three typical pulverized high-ash Indian coal samples each weighing around 15 mg. TGA experiments were carried out for four different heating rates (5, 10, 15, 20 K/min) and weight loss curves have been obtained. Out of the various methods proposed to analyze the TGA data, the following methods have been evaluated i) Friedman method, ii) Flynn-Wall-Ozawa method (FWO), iii) Kissinger method, iv) Kissinger-Akahira-Sunose (KAS) method, and v) Miura-Maki method. Activation energy and frequency factor to be used in the Arrhenius equation is calculated using all the above methods. The most accurate method for analyzing TGA data for high-ash Indian coal is FWO as per studies carried out in this research work.