Fractional Distillation Process Utilized to Produce Light Fractional Fuelfrom Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) Waste Plastic

摘要

Plastics are not easily biodegradable; and because of these characteristics they can remain under landfill andwater for a very long period of time. All over the world only 6% of waste plastics are recycled and the rest of all wasteplastics are dumped into landfills. An experiment was conducted in a laboratory scale batch process under Labconco’sfume hood utilizing low density polyethylene (LDPE). The experiment was carried out to obtain a hydrocarbon fuelproduct utilizing thermal degradation. Many research studies have successfully demonstrated that waste plastics such aslow density polyethylene (LDPE), high density polyethylene (HDPE), polypropylene (PP) and polystyrene (PS) can beconverted to valuable liquid hydrocarbon fuels. For experimental purposes we used 500 gm of LDPE as raw materials.This particular experiment is a two step process; the first step process involves extracting hydrocarbon fuels as mixture ofboth short and long chain hydrocarbon compounds. During the second step the fuel obtained in the first process isrefractionated by thermal degradation process utilizing a distillation column. This process yields a short hydrocarbonchain liquid fuel that has similar properties to gasoline grade fuels. Analysis of these fuels was conducted by GasChromatography and Mass Spectrometer (GC/MS), FT-IR Spectrum 100 and Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC).The results show that the produced fuels are good quality fuels with high energy content. ASTM test result indicates thatfuel has low sulfur level (3.2 ppm) and the fuel hydrocarbon range shown by GC/MS analysis is C4-C10.