Combustion characteristics of mixed municipal solid waste in thermogravimetric analysis and lab scale fluidized bed

In this paper, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and a lab scale fluidized bed facility were used as experimental means. The data in the two different experimental systems were introduced and compared. Experimental results show that the differences of combustion velocity among different wastes in Fluidized Bed(FB) were very small whereas in thermogravimetric analyzer the differences can not be ignored as the value range of combustion velocity variation was between 0.49 and 5.5. It took municipal solid waste 3-3.5 min to burn out in FB, but in thermogravimetric analyzer, the time was 20-25 min. It can be concluded that, in general, the behavior of a mixture of waste in TGA can be expressed by simple combination of individual components of the waste mixtures. Only minor deviations from the rule were observed. In FB, it was found that, for some mixtures, there was interference among the components during FB combustion.