Investigation of Tyre Recycling Possibilities with Cracking Process

The field of vehicle tyres is a key pillar to the Vehicle Engineering BSc launched in September 2016 at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Informatics of the University of Miskolc and the Tyre manufacturing postgraduate course in the technological specialisation on which work is in progress. Generating a yearly amount of several 100 millions of tyres as waste of the automotive industry is, almost 80% of them as passenger car tyres and 20% as truck tyres, whose management creates a huge load to bear on society. These days a relevant task of this field is to find a solution that is reducing environmental loads and sustainable to the solution. Vehicle tyres contain many organic and inorganic compounds: natural and artificial caoutchoucs (NR, SBR, BR, IIR, EPDM), silica, zinc oxide, sulphur, steel and artificial fibres, anti-ageing agents, carbon black etc. whose production requires a significant use of fossil energy carriers. There are several ways of recycling tyres lost their original function: incineration, recycling in its material (rubber-based pavements, roads, sporting grounds) or chemical conversion (energy carrier, chemical raw material), respectively. These days cracking in combined material flow embodies one of the main research directions of chemical conversion. The bottom line is that several raw materials are decomposed in parallel during catalyst-assisted thermal cracking: blends of different ratios of biomass, plastics, rubber tyre. This publication presents options of chemical conversion and its optimisable parameters. We investigated thermo-catalytic thermal cracking (cracking) of rubber and polystyrene waste producing thereby valuable petrol- and gas oil-type hydrocarbon products.