Multi-stage Waste Tyre Pyrolysis: An Optimisation Approach

Extensive studies on pyrolysis as a way to convert waste organic materials into useful products have been carried out for decades. In waste tyre pyrolysis, the products yielded are suitable for use as fuel. But on the other hand, the process is energy intensive. This work therefore proposes a multi-stage design to optimize a waste tyre pyrolysis process by minimizing the energy usage. The degradation kinetics and the heat flow of tyre in pyrolysis were first studied by thermal analysis. The results were used to construct a tyre particle pyrolysis model for verifying the proposed multi-stage pyrolysis approach. It was shown by the model that the proposed multi-stage tyre pyrolysis design can reduce energy usage by 21.7 %. This approach for optimizing the waste tyre pyrolysis through the thermal studies on tyre and the multi-stage design is believed to be applicable to other feedstock such as waste biomass.