Pyrolysis

Pyrolysis is a thermochemical decomposition of organic material at elevated temperatures in the

absence of oxygen (or any halogen). It involves the simultaneous change of chemical
composition and physical phase, and is irreversible. The word is coined from the Greekderived elements pyro "fire" and lysis "separating".

Pyrolysis Environment
After dumping the bed of catalyst and raw materials we make the pyrolysis
environment nitrogen inert gas from bottom drain of reactor and slowly charge the
nitrogen upto some positive pressure and remove the oxygen from top vent of the
reactor.
Kinetics of Pyrolysis
Temperature
Temperature is one of the most important operating
variable, since the temperature dominates the cracking
reaction of the polymer materials. In Shah et al.s
study, mixture of post-consumed plastics of PE, PP
and PS was pyrolyzed in a fixed-bed batch reactor at
different temperatures for one hour. It was found that
higher reaction temperature favours the gas production
and production of heavy molecular weight products in
the liquid.

Rate of Heating
In a batch process, the plastic is normally heated from room temperature to the cracking
temperature in several minutes. It is a slow pyrolysis process. It was found that heating rate
usually varied from 10 to 100 C/minute
in previous slow pyrolysis researches. In
Saha
and
Ghoshals study on pyrolysis of CocaCola
drink PET bottles, by using thermo
gravimetric analysis (TGA). In the figure,
dAlpha/dT, defined as the rate of reaction
(K-1),
is
plotted as a function of absolute
temperature
for different heating rates from 10 to 25
K/min. It was found
that higher heating rate promotes the rate of pyrolysis reactions.

Effect of Pressure on Pyrolysis

High pressure increases the yield of noncondensable gases and decreases the yield of
liquid products. The average molecular weight of
gas product also decreases with the increase of
pressure. The boiling points of the pyrolysis
products are increased under higher pressure,
therefore, under pressurised environment heavy
hydrocarbons are further pyrolyzed instead of
vaporized at given operation temperature. The
influence of pressure on the concentration of
double bond, C=C, of the liquid product was not
significant as reported by Murata et al.

Residence time
Longer residence time favours a further conversion of the primary products thus yielding more
thermal stable products such as light molecular weight hydrocarbons, non-condensable
petroleum gases. In a slow pyrolysis, long residence time encourages the carbonization process
and produces more tar and char in the products.