I.

INTRODUCTION

The primary energy is consuming increasingly every year,

therefore the renewable energy is getting more attentions.
Biomass is one of the renewable resources, which is promising
and in large amount. In China, about 630 million tons of crop
residues are produced every year, most of which are burned
and wasted in low efficiency [1]. Biomass thermo chemical
conversion technologies, including gasification and
combustion, have large potential to utilize biomass. However,
there are some demerits of biomass, such as large volume, low
energy density, high moisture content and high cost for
transport. Therefore it is very necessary to pre treat the biomass
to meet the demand of different utilization technologies.
Torrefaction (low temperature pyrolysis), is one of the
pretreatment technologies for biomass. It provides a mild
pyrolysis temperature (200-300) to convert the biomass
into a solid fuel of which the grindability and energy density
are improved and properties are closer to the coal. many
research groups [2] have investigated the effects of
temperature, residence time, material types etc. on the
torrefaction process and the products distribution, including the
char and gaseous products. But few researchers studied the tars
produced during torrefaction process. The tar problems are the
key difficulties of biomass pyrolysis and gasification. How to
convert and remove the tar is a very important topic.
Torrefaction is a very mild pyrolysis process, of which the tars
are mainly the primary tars. If the pyrolysis temperature is
increased or the atmosphere is changed, the tars will further
convert to secondary and tertiary tars [3]. In our study, we
selected rice straw, the typical agricultural residuals as the raw
material. We investigated the effects of different pyrolysis
temperature(200,250,300) on the tar yield and
constituents. The torrefied char were also studied.
II.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A. Materials
Rice straw (RS) used in our studies is from Jing Shan
Shanghai. The raw material was grinded into a particular size
range of 100-150 m by a KER-1/100A sealed sample
preparation mill from Zhenjiang Kerui Zhiyang Shebei Co.
Ltd. Then the RS particles were dried in oven for 12 h at 30
before used.
B. Reactors and Procedures
The reactor used in our studies is the first stage of the twostage hot rod reactor by which we mainly investigated
pyrolysis process of biomass, showed in Fig.1. The original
concept for the two-stage hot rod reactor is from the Kandiyoti
research group in Imperial College London who have done
tremendous work in biomass pyrolysis and gasification [4,5].
To cooperate with Professor Kandiyoti, our research group
constructed a two-stage reactor and did a lot of investigations
on biomass gasification and tar conversion, also including
some improvements for the reactor [6,7]. Figure 1 is the
schematic diagram of the first stage hot rod reactor.