Impact of Ball-Milling Pretreatment on Pyrolysis Behavior and Kinetics of Crystalline Cellulose

• Main Authors: Khan, A.S., Man, Z., Bustam, M.A., Kait, C.F., Khan, M.I., Muhammad, N., Nasrullah, A., Ullah, Z., Ahmad, P.
• Format: Article
• Published: Springer Netherlands 2016
• Online Access: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84969544786&doi=10.1007%2fs12649-015-9460-6&partnerID=40&md5=1933d62150010c6288540be5931c38e0; http://eprints.utp.edu.my/31006/

Effect of ball-milling pretreatment on pyrolysis characteristics of cellulose was studied by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) at four different heating rates; 5, 10, 20, and 40 K/min. Variation in the thermal stability and activation energy of cellulose with ball-milling were calculated by TGA Kinetics using Kissinger, Kissinger�Akahira�Sunose, Flynn�Wall�Ozawa and Starink model free methods. Results demonstrated that ball-milling reduced the thermal stability and activation energy of cellulose. The original and ball-milled cellulose were thoroughly characterized by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and Scanning electron microscopy. X-ray diffraction analysis revealed that ball-milling decreased the crystallinity of cellulose from 93 to 51 . The results suggested that ball-milling pretreatment led to effective disruption of crystalline cellulose to amorphous cellulose. It is, therefore, concluded that the ball-milled cellulose can easily become a useful source of chemicals and energy than crystalline cellulose. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.