Kinetics of Granulated Waste Tyre Pyrolysis via Thermogravimetry and Model-Free Methods

Abstract

There has been an increase in global consumption of waste tyres over the years. However only a portion of the total amount of waste tyres can be recycled or reused for other applications. Land-filling has been considered an alternative to address the problem of continued waste tyres accumulation, but huge space is needed for this and the reusable resources are wasted. This therefore has led to environmental and economic problem of disposal of the large mass of waste tyres. Waste tyre pyrolysis, which is the thermal decomposition in absence of oxygen, can be used to recover both energy and material. Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) is the technique commonly used to evaluate the weight loss kinetics associated with the vaporisation of materials during pyrolysis. The purpose of this study was to establish the kinetics of thermal degradation of waste tyres by TGA and to compare the activation energies (E) obtained using two model-free methods. The experiments were carried out in a nitrogen environment and a temperature range of 20°C to 600°C  at three heating rates. Results show that the pyrolysis process of the tyre crumb occurs in three stages as the various components of the tyre undergo decomposition. A mean activation energy of approximately 232 kJmol^-1 was obtained using the two models.

Keywords

• Waste tyre,activation energy,thermal degradation,model-free

References

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