Thermogravimetry (TG) is the fast and reliable method for characterization of thermal decomposition of any material and in particular to determine the kinetics of pyrolytic decomposition of sewage sludge. Two types of sewage sludge with and without addition of lime were investigated from kinetic point of view. For TG analysis samples of selected sewage sludge were heated under the inert atmosphere of argon with constant heating rate from 303 to 1273 K; the three heating rate β = 5, 10 and 20 K/min were chosen. The iso-conversion methods of Friedman and Ozawa-Flynn-Wall were employed for analysis of TG results. As the sewage sludge decomposition is very complex process it cannot be described by a simple stoichiometric equation, therefore the so called lumping of reactions in the selected temperature ranges were used with detailed principles arising from visual analysis of DTG curve. The deconvolution of DTG curves performed according to Fraser-Suzuki asymmetric profile allowed the identification of number of lumps and their contribution to the overall mass loss. So the decomposition of sewage sludge with lime addition could be described with five groups of reactions while the one without lime by means of six lumps. The thermal decomposition of sewage sludge was assumed to proceed according to the scheme of parallel concurrent independent reactions of n-th order. The values of the apparent activation energies at different constant values of conversion degrees were determined by the iso-conversion analysis. To estimate the kinetic parameters the non-linear regression with Levenberg-Marquart optimization procedure was used. The kinetic parameters such as activation energy, pre-exponential factor, reaction order and fraction of total mass loss associated with a given reaction were determined. The impact of sewage sludge liming revealed in essential differences of pyrolysis products and pyrolysis kinetics of limed sludge and without lime one was highlighted.
