Eunji Lee  Won Yang  Uendo Lee  Youngjae Lee

Vol. 30,  No. 1, pp. 37-46, Mar.  2024
10.7464/ksct.2024.30.1.37

Plastic Pyrolysis Non-condensable gas Thermochemical conversion Simulation

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Environmental problems caused by plastic waste have been continuously growing around the world, and plastic waste is increasing even faster after COVID-19. In particular, PP and PE account for more than half of all plastic production, and the amount of waste from these two materials is at a serious level. As a result, researchers are searching for an alternative method to plastic recycling, and plastic pyrolysis is one such alternative. In this paper, a numerical study was conducted on the pyrolysis behavior of non-condensable gas to predict the chemical reaction behavior of the pyrolysis gas. Based on gas products estimated from preceding literature, the behavior of non-condensable gas was analyzed according to temperature and residence time. Numerical analysis showed that as the temperature and residence time increased, the production of H2 and heavy hydrocarbons increased through the conversion of the non-condensable gas, and at the same time, the CH4 and C6H6 species decreased by participating in the reaction. In addition, analysis of the production rate showed that the decomposition reaction of C2H4 was the dominant reaction for H2 generation. Also, it was found that more H2 was produced by PE with higher C2H4 contents. As a future work, an experiment is needed to confirm how to increase the conversion rate of H2 and carbon in plastics through the various operating conditions derived from this study’s numerical analysis results.