In situ evolution of functional groups in char during cellulose pyrolysis under the catalysis of KCl and CaCl2

[Display omitted] •An in situ and semi-quantitative analysis tool was proposed for char evolution.•The effects of chemical reactions and physical migration were separated.•The ‘char rearrangement’ of cellulose pyrolysis consists of four stages.•The climax stage after the DTG peak performed homogeneous devolatilization.•KCl and CaCl2 altered the order of dehydration and ‘char devolatilization’. A combination of in situ diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform (DRIFT) spectroscopy, perturbation-correlation moving-window two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy (PCMW2D) and two-dimensional correlation spectroscopy (2D-COS) was used to reveal the catalytic mechanism of KCl and CaCl2 on cellulose char evolution during slow pyrolysis. Pretreatments of the one-dimensional spectra ensure the semi-quantitative analysis of the evolution of functional groups in pyrolysis char, which invoked principal component analysis followed by a Butterworth filter for denoising and extended multiplicative scatter correction. Through the differential processing of the absolute changes, the char evolution product was divided into ‘char rearrangement’ and ‘char devolatilization’ processes containing a high contribution from chemical reactions and physical migration, respectively. The ‘char rearrangement’ of cellulose pyrolysis consists of four stages, i.e. the budding, development, climax and decline stages, which were dominated by H-bond network reconfiguration, the consumption of C–O–C and OH, homogeneous devolatilization and aromatization, respectively. The uppermost influence of the two salts on the pyrolysis is the relationship alteration of C–O–C cleavage, dehydration reactions and ‘char devolatilization’. For neat, KCl-loaded and CaCl2-loaded cellulose, the unsaturated bonds were formed in the light reaction intermediate, heavy reaction intermediates and cellulose chain, respectively. Especially, the cleavage of most C–O–C following dehydration reactions conduced a shoulder peak in the differential thermogravimetry curve before the maximum weight loss rate of CaCl2-loaded sample. Due to the alteration, the pyrolysis was advanced but slowed down by the high content of unsaturated bonds in char. This study provides a powerful tool for the in situ semi-quantitative analysis of char evolution during the non-catalytic and catalytic thermo-chemical conversion of solid fuels and waste, and the results benefit to both biomass pyrolysis mechanism revelation and industrial produc