Conventional pyrolysis of Plastic waste for Product recovery and utilization of pyrolytic gases for carbon nanotubes production.

Inevitably increase in plastic demand has resulted in an overgrowing production on a global scale. The utilization of plastics has been applied to a number of industries as it is a durable, moldable, and inexpensive material. High exploitation of plastic had resulted in a hefty amount of waste production, which is not easy to recycle due to its non-degradable nature and results in landfills. Nowadays, waste to energy processes such as pyrolysis has emerged as a superlative process for the management of plastic waste by converting it into useful products. On the other hand, the employment of carbon nanotubes (CNT’s) has shown high growth in their production. CNT’s were generally synthesized from conventional gases like methane, ethane, and ethylene. Plastic waste can be utilized to substitute the feed material for the CNT synthesis via pyrolysis method. In this study, a two-step pyrolysis process was investigated for product recovery and CNT’s production. The first steps consisted of catalytic and non-catalytic degradation of mixed plastic waste in a vertical fixed bed reactor at 500 °C with a heating rate of 20 °C/min for the production of pyrolytic oil and gases and were analyzed. The second step consists of the employment of catalytic pyrolysis gases in a horizontal tube reactor maintained at a temperature of 800 °C over a bed of catalyst for the synthesis of CNT’s via catalytic vapor deposition (CVD) technique. It was established that the use of catalyst decreases the oil phase production from 80.5 to 64%, char from 9 to 6.5% while an increase in gas phase production from 10.5 to 29.5% was reported. The alteration of hydrocarbons to CNT’s was investigated via pre- and post-GC analysis of the gas samples. Post gas investigation indicates an increased concentration of hydrogen in the sample. Also, the decline of hydrocarbon gases concentration was observed in post sample analysis. Also, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) analysis confirms the synthesis of CNT’s.