A major advantage of the process is its high efficiency. Each plant can produce up to 19k litres of fuel from 20 tonnes of waste plastic.
The building or expanding of incinerators has become difficult due to opposition from governments and community groups with environmental concerns, most notably the levels of emissions.
Liquefaction of plastic is a superior method of reusing this resource. These distillate products are excellent fuels and make the Cynar Technology one of the best, economically feasible and environmentally sensitive recycling systems in the world today.
The synthetic fuels produced, given their low sulphur and high cetane qualities, will most likely be blended into a larger pool for use in trucks, buses, trains, boats, heavy equipment and generators.
essentially equivalent to petroleum distillate. The plastic is pyrolised at 370ºC-420ºC and the pyrolysis gases are condensed in a 2-stage condenser to give a low sulphur content distillate.
- evenly heating the plastic to a narrow temperature range without excessive temperature variations
- purging oxygen from pyrolysis chamber,
- managing the carbonaceous char by-product before it acts as a thermal insulator and lowers the heat transfer to the plastic
- careful condensation and fractionation of the pyrolysis vapours to produce distillate of good quality and consistency
Waste plastics are loaded via a hot-melt infeed system directly into main pyrolysis chamber.
Agitation commences to even the temperature and homogenise the feedstocks. Pyrolysis then commences and the plastic becomes a vapour. Non-plastic materials fall to the bottom of the chamber.
The vapour is converted into the various fractions in the distillation column, the distillates then pass into the recovery tanks.
From the recovery tanks, the product is sent to a centrifuge to remove contaminants such as water or carbon.
The cleaned distillates are then pumped to the storage tanks.
from mixed and low-grade plastic waste.
The key to an efficient pyrolysis process is to ensure the plastic is heated uniformly and rapidly. If temperature gradients develop in the molten plastic mass then different degrees of cracking will occur and products with a wide distribution of chain lengths will be formed.
Another important aspect of pyrolysis is to use a negative pressure (or a partial vacuum) environment. This ensures that oxidation reactions are minimised and that gaseous pyrolysis vapours are quickly removed from the process chamber thereby reducing the incidence of secondary reactions and the formation of undesirable by-products.
The polymer is gently 'cracked' at relatively low temperatures to give predominantly straight chain aliphatic hydrocarbons with little formation of by-products. These hydrocarbons are then selectively condensed and cleaved further catalytically to produce the average carbon chain length required
for distillate fuel.