EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Investigating kinetic behavior and reaction mechanism on autothermal pyrolysis of polyethylene plastic

Wen Xie, Jing Su, Xiangkun Zhang, Tan Li, Cong Wang, Xiangzhou Yuan and Kaige Wang

Energy, 2023, vol. 269, issue C

Abstract: To reduce the energy supply for pyrolysis, autothermal pyrolysis is one of the most promising approaches to upcycle plastic waste. In this work, both single-step and multi-step methods were applied to perform kinetic studies of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) pyrolysis under oxidative atmospheres (0, 5, and 10% O2 balanced by N2) by changing the heating rate from 5 to 20 K min−1. Miura integral method was then used to estimate the apparent activation energy. The major findings showed that the multi-step method using asymmetric double sigmoidal (Asym2Sig) deconvolution procedure was more appropriate to study kinetic behaviors of LDPE autothermal pyrolysis. The activation energy needed for LDPE pyrolysis under N2 was 271 kJ·mol−1, while the activation energies of the three pseudo-reactions under 5% O2 were 71, 153 and 189 kJ·mol−1, and under 10% O2 were 74, 224 and 169 kJ·mol−1, indicating that LDPE autothermal pyrolysis was more energy-saving than conventional LDPE pyrolysis. Additionally, the reaction mechanism was proposed to provide an accurate and critical guideline for commercializing this novel technical route, which is beneficial to achieving sustainable plastic waste management and mitigating plastic pollution, simultaneously.

Keywords: Plastic waste; Autothermal pyrolysis; Thermal characteristics; Kinetic analysis; Multi-step method; Asym2Sig deconvolution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544223002116
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:269:y:2023:i:c:s0360544223002116

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2023.126817

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:energy:v:269:y:2023:i:c:s0360544223002116