Jet fuel production from waste plastics via catalytic pyrolysis with activated carbons

Yayun Zhang, Dengle Duan, Hanwu Lei, Elmar Villota and Roger Ruan

Applied Energy, 2019, vol. 251, issue C, -

Abstract: With the increasing amount of waste plastics being used domestically and industrially, the disposition of those being not reusable is a challenging task. Herein, the catalytic pyrolysis of waste plastics over seven types of commercial and home-made activated carbons was studied in a facile tube reactor. A central composite experimental design was further adapted to optimize the reaction conditions and up to 100 area% of the obtained liquid components belonged to jet fuel-ranged hydrocarbons, in which alkanes and aromatics accounted for 71.8% and 28.2%, respectively. Experiment results revealed that these activated carbons although generated via various physical and chemical activation processes could all exhibited excellent catalytic performance in converting low-density polyethylene into jet fuel and H2-enriched gases. Properties of activated carbons were also characterized by scanning electron microscope, Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, nitrogen gas adsorption, and chemical adsorption. It can be concluded that the acidity was a critical factor in determining the catalyst activity, where jet fuel-ranged alkanes and aromatics were favored by using activated carbons of weak and relevant strong acidity, respectively. Rising catalytic reaction temperature could enhance the aromatization of alkanes to increase the percentage of aromatics and release more hydrogen molecules. In addition, the production of jet fuel was also achieved from daily waste plastics, which was also confirmed by nuclear magnetic resonance analysis. The present work offers a novel route of converting waste plastics directly into transportation jet fuel.

Keywords: Activated carbons; Waste plastics; Catalytic pyrolysis; Jet fuel; Hydrogen gas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261919310116
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:appene:v:251:y:2019:i:c:53

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2019.113337

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().