Kinetic model identification and parameters estimation from TGA experiments

The presented work is a part of an ongoing research effort on the development of a general methodology for the determination of kinetic models of solid thermal decomposition under pyrolysis conditions with thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) devices. The goal is to determine a simple and robust kinetic model for a given solid with the minimum of TGA experiments. From the latter point of view, this work can be seen as the optimal design of TGA experiments for pyrolysis kinetic modelling. In this paper, a general procedure is presented and more precise results are given about the influence of the sensitivity matrix on the estimation of the kinetic parameters and about the important influence of the specific TGA runs used for parameter estimation on the precision of the fitted parameters. The first results are shown for simulated applications; in the final part, the presented results concern cellulose pyrolysis in a Setaram TGA device.