Developing a combustion-driven reactor for waste conversion

Abstract One of the problems of the scalability to industrial applications of pyrolysis reactors is the high electric energy consumption. In this study, a novel device in which a self-sustaining combustion front drives the input energy for pyrolysis is proposed. A new methodology to define a representative longitudinal temperature profile based on the time-averaged method at each thermocouple position is introduced. The reactor was tested under operating conditions of air velocities, and bed compositions. The reliability of twenty-nine runs was verified through repeatability, empirical dimensionless correlations, and analysis of variance. The temperature average standard deviation ranged from 30 °C to 54 °C, depending on the bed composition. The dimensionless analysis revealed the power-law relationship between temperature and inputs. The analysis of variance explained the independence of the input parameters on defining the longitudinal temperature profile. A positive energy balance ranging from 1.6 to 5.8 kWh/kg of initial fuel mass, a consequence of a self-sustaining combustion process, was a characteristic of all experiments.