On the Pyrolysis Kinetics of Plastic Waste: Kinetic Analysis for Devolatilization Stage

Research Interests

Generation of plastic wastes are among the most pressing challenges of the 21st century and researchers around the world will need to find new ways to handle the disposal of their waste as much of it is already starting to pile up in landfills. In research conducted at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, plastic wastes are thermally recycled by pyrolytic gasification to gaseous fuel. To achieve this conversion, a fundamental investigation was conducted on the kinetic analysis of waste plastic including polyethylene using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) combined with online gas chromatography (GC) in an inert gas, nitrogen, with different heating rates (5-30 ˚C /min). The plastic wastes were pyrolyzed in an electrically heated TGA furnace from 30 ˚C to 700˚C with a nitrogen flow rate of 100 mL/min. Under these conditions, the polymer pyrolyzed into a gaseous mixture of hydrocarbons and hydrogen. The pyrolyzate mixture was then conducted into a GC where it was used to analyze the gaseous products. The result of this work will help the development of kinetic parameters of devolatilization stage of the polyethylene. The kinetic analysis created for this process was performed using the distributed activation energy model (DAEM).