Plastic trash has been building up for over a century in our landfills and oceans. Not only does it affect birds and marine life, but the trash affects our lives by changing our oceans, our weather currents, and our food. To truly deplete the plastics that fill our landfills and oceans we must design not only a cost effective means of disposing of plastics, but a means that can provide a profit for doing so. It is well known that plastic is a byproduct of petroleum oil, and petroleum is a trillion-dollar business.

The heat transfer system created will be used to heat plastics in such a way to break apart the polymer chains that make up plastics to create a vapor. The vapor will then be cooled where it will create petroleum oil, wax, and gaseous byproduct. This project research will continue by redesigning the furnace used in research previously to get a higher, more stable heat that will reach the boiling point of the plastic to create the vapor. The system will require thermocouples to measure the temperature and provide feedback through a loop to maintain proper temperatures within the furnace. Vapor will be collected in a pipe and routed to a cooling unit. There it will be condensed back into a liquid form to create petroleum oil, a solid wax, and gaseous byproducts. Variables in future research includes types of plastics, temperature magnitudes, temperature rates, and times at temperature for the reaction to take place.

This research’s goal will be to build a heat transfer system that will be able to collect oil from plastics. Further research for oil optimization from pyrolysis of synthetic polymers will aid in the creation of commercial/industrial sized pyrolysis systems that will make eco friendliness economical. The results of this work can aid a value to the new energy technology. Other groups have tested a certain type of plastic using one heating method and not the other. There is no complete collection of data on the pyrolysis of plastic with varying plastic types and various time and temperatures. Ideally, while testing plastics, the parameters for the efficiency of our system can be measured and optimized for how to get the most oil out of plastics with the least amount of overhead cost such as electricity, operator time, etc. applying the practice in the academic world and industrial world. The result, we believe, or the optimization and popularization of the pyrolysis of plastics will be a cleaner world with less plastic waste and pollution in the air, a stronger economy with an annual \$100 billion to be made, and more informed and conscious world when it comes to plastics and how detrimental they can be to our world.


The Design and Implementation of a Heat Transfer System for the Pyrolysis of Synthetic Polymers

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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