Stability of pyrolysis condensates during their high-temperature treatment

Abstract

As part of a project dealing with the material use of waste plastics processed by pyrolysis, a method for the purification of primary pyrolysis gas at temperatures above the dew point of condensing components was proposed. In order to avoid the loss of liquid products, two procedures have been proposed to study this issue. The first procedure consists in separating the pyrolysis condensate from permanent gases and its subsequent evaporation and introduction into a high-temperature reactor where the purification takes place. The second procedure used the same equipment, but the pyrolyser was connected in series with a high temperature reactor by a heated tube. The function of the device is demonstrated on a pair of pure polymers, namely highdensity polyethylene and polypropylene. In practice, however, the device is used for testing waste plastics. The mass balance of liquid, gaseous and solid products of pyrolysis and subsequent vapour phase conduction through a high-tem-perature reactor was supplemented by data from chromatographic analysis. Experiments have shown that the separation of pyrolysis and subsequent evaporation of the condensate in an independent reactor causes the formation of an undesirable amount of fine aerosol (mist). Pyrolysis without any subsequent high-temperature step produced 85–90 % condensate. The inclusion of a separate high-temperature reactor reduced the yield of condensate to 44.5–47.5 %, at the expense of the above-mentioned mist. Its conver-sion back to liquid is difficult and makes the process inefficient for industry. In tests with the series-connected pyrolyser and the high-temperature reactor, the situation was significantly better. 68.5–73.5 % of condensate was obtained in this case. In addition to the formation of mist, the conduction of steam of condensing components through the high-temperature reactor also caused a slight change in the composition of the liquids obtained. There was a decrease in the proportion of C21–C29 hydrocarbons in products and, conversely, an increase in the concentration of C5–C15 hydrocarbons. Besides verifying a suitable approach to the high-temperature processing of pyrolysis products, the experiments showed that changing a single subparameter (in this case the separation of the two reactors) significantly altered the results of the experiments. During laboratory simulation of industrial processes, it is important not to approach simplifications, but to copy all conditions as much as possible.