The exponential growth of polyolefin plastic production gives rise to tremendous post-consumer plastic waste and has become a global catastrophe. To address the crisis effectively and economically, large-scale recycling approaches based on catalytical reactions are urgently required. A state-of-the-art pressurized, semi-batch reactor was designed for hydrogenolysis reactions of polyolefins under reactive separation conditions. The reactor decreased the gas formation from over-hydrogenolysis and eliminated the need for further separation to obtain liquid products by employing continuous feeding gas, which allows for the primary liquid products (C8-C28) to be collected in a condenser and leaves behind polymeric species in the reactor. We also studied the production of different hydrocarbon mixture distributions by tuning the operating parameters, including carrier gas flow rate and pressure. Additional studies unveiled that hydrogenolysis of polyolefins occurred under an ambient H2 atmosphere in the designed reactor system and resulted in alkane/alkene mixtures, which are widely used as precursors of higher-value commodities, such as surfactants.

Continuous semi-batch reactor for scaling up polyolefins upcycling

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