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Polyurethane Foam Waste Upcycling into an Efficient and Low Pollutant Gasification Syngas
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Researchers modeled the gasification of polyurethane foam waste under various conditions, finding that optimized thermochemical treatment can convert this common polymer waste into hydrogen-rich syngas with low pollutant output, offering a viable energy recovery pathway for difficult-to-recycle plastic foam materials.
Waste treatment has attracted much attention and, in this regard, gasification processes offer an efficient thermochemical technique that can produce a syngas rich in hydrogen. This technique has been well developed for solid waste and biomass while investigations on gasification of polymeric foam are rare. Therefore, this study explores the treatment of polyurethane foam waste with different gasifying agents, based on thermodynamic modeling. The polymeric foam gasification was developed using the best model for estimating higher heating value (gross calorific value). As the results indicated, models based on both ultimate and proximate analyses had better performance in predicting higher heating value. As one of the main objectives and novelties, the steam and air gasification performance of flexible and rigid polyurethane foam wastes was investigated and compared from efficiency and CO2 emission viewpoints. Polyurethane foam gasification by steam resulted in higher hydrogen efficiency, led to lower energy efficiency and produced lower CO2 emissions compared to gasification by air. A hydrogen efficiency of 41.4% was obtained for gasification of waste flexible polyurethane foam by steam. An energy efficiency of 76.6% and CO2 emission of 7.43 g per mole of feedstock were attained for waste flexible polyurethane foam gasified by air.
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