The aim of this study was to understand the influence of catalyst in thermal degradation behavior of rice husk (RH) in catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP) process. An iso-conversional Kissinger kinetic model was introduced into this study to understand the activation energy (EA), pre-exponential value (A), Enthalpy (ΔH), Entropy (ΔS) and Gibb's energy (ΔG) of non-catalytic fast pyrolysis (NCFP) and CFP of RH. The study revealed that the addition of natural zeolite catalyst enhanced the rate of devolatilization and decomposition of RH associated with lowest EA value (153.10 kJ/mol) compared to other NCFP and CFP using nickel catalyst. Lastly, an uncertainty estimation was applied on the best fit non-linear regression model (MNLR) to identify the explanatory variables. The finding showed that it had the highest probability to obtain 73.8-74.0% mass loss in CFP of rice husk using natural zeolite catalyst.
The aim of this work was to recover the cellulose fibers from EFB using low-transition-temperature-mixtures (LTTMs) as a green delignification approach. The hydrogen bonding of LTTMs observed in 1H NMR tends to disrupt the three-dimensional structure of lignin and further remove the lignin from EFB. Delignification process of EFB strands and EFB powder were performed using standard l-malic acid and cactus malic acid-LTTMs. The recovered cactus malic acid-LTTMs showed higher glucose concentration of 8.07 mg/mL than the recovered l-malic acid LTTMs (4.15 mg/mL). This implies that cactus malic acid-LTTMs had higher delignification efficiency which led to higher amount of cellulose hydrolyzed into glucose. The cactus malic acid-LTTMs-delignified EFB was the most feasible fibers for making paper due to its lowest kappa number of 69.84. The LTTMs-delignified EFB has great potential to be used for making specialty papers in pulp and paper industry.