With the rapid development of the current society, the world faces energy shortages, greenhouse gases and ecological rings. Issues such as environmental protection have become increasingly prominent. A new method was developed to produce vaporchar using bamboo as starting materials via a VTC. Bamboo and the vaporchar were characterized by scanning electron microscope and FTIR to indicate the transformation in their morphologies and chemical structure, respectively. Afterwards, a comparative study in relation to the thermal behavior and pyrolysis characteristics for the vaporchar and the raw bamboo was investigated. FTIR spectra of raw bamboo and semi-char of bamboo vaporchar of at different final temperature samples was coupled with the TGA to analyze the chemical structure changed. Then, the relationship between the activation energy and various conversion rates of bamboo and vaporchar were evaluated by the methods of KAS and FWO. It shows the activation energy of bamboo is about 88.01-144.13 kJ/mol and 88.33-140.65 kJ/mol and that of VTC is about 142.19-355.96 kJ/mol and 139.31-360.71 kJ/mol for FWO and KAS, respectively. Compared with the bamboo sample, the activation energies of VTC obtained at 12 h are higher than that of raw bamboo with the increasing conversion level. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.