This paper analyses over 89,000 documents between scientific journals and international patents in order to identify main technologies for material pyrolysis (i.e. fluidized bed, hot balls, microwave, plasma, and laser), compare them in terms of technical performances and discover future trends.

The predictive model for future trends is based on the evolutionary model of the TRIZ theory, with particular attention to the evolutionary law, “from macro to micro”, which explains how technical systems evolve towards increasingly smaller, controlled, and resource-efficient interactions. In our case, we applied the focus to the interface between the heat source and the pyrolyzed raw material.

The proposed evolutionary model showed a substantial alignment with chronological trends, and the model was consistent with both patent trends and those of the scientific literature.

To make the analysis quantitatively more robust, a comparison of the different technologies has also been introduced in terms of percentage distribution and the number of patents/papers referring to the different classes of heating rates and reaction temperatures and types of flash/fast/intermediate/slow reaction. Finally, a quantitative metric based on the innovation index has been adopted, to take into account the number of citations normalized on the years of publication.

The main outputs of this study identified that radiations-based pyrolysis, involving microscopic interaction, seem more interesting in term of technical performances (i.e. heating rate and reaction temperature), although their technological growth has yet to occur, unlike fluidized bed and hot balls, which typically work at a macroscopic level and seem to have already reached maturity. According to a bibliometric index, laser corpus resulted three time more innovative then fluidized bed reactors papers, especially for heating rates and reactions temperature.

本文分析了89,000多种科学期刊和国际专利之间的文献，以识别材料热解的主要技术（如流化床，热球，微波，等离子和激光），在技术性能方面进行比较并发现未来的趋势。

未来趋势的预测模型基于TRIZ理论的演化模型，特别关注“从宏观到微观”的演化规律，它解释了技术系统如何向越来越小的，可控制的和资源有效的相互作用发展。在我们的案例中，我们将焦点应用于热源和热解原料之间的界面。

提出的进化模型显示出与时间趋势基本吻合，并且该模型与专利趋势和科学文献的趋势都一致。

为了使分析在定量上更可靠，还引入了不同技术的比较，涉及百分比分布和专利/论文数量，涉及加热速率和反应温度的不同类别以及闪蒸/快速/中间/反应慢。最后，采用了基于创新指数的定量指标，以考虑到发表年份标准化的引用次数。

这项研究的主要成果表明，涉及微观相互作用的基于辐射的热解，在技术性能（即加热速率和反应温度）方面似乎更加有趣，尽管与流化床和热球不同，它们的技术增长尚未出现，它通常在宏观上起作用，并且似乎已经成熟。根据文献索引，激光语料库的创新性是流化床反应器论文的三倍，特别是在加热速率和反应温度方面。