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Upgrading Mixed Agricultural Plastic and Lignocellulosic Waste to Liquid Fuels by Catalytic Pyrolysis

Catalysts 2022 9 citations ? Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count. Score: 35 ? 0–100 AI score estimating relevance to the microplastics field. Papers below 30 are filtered from public browse.
Farid Sotoudehnia, Armando G. McDonald

Summary

Researchers compounded mixed agricultural plastic waste (netting, twine, film) and lignocellulosic residues (bluegrass straw/chaff) in a twin-screw extruder and subjected the homogenised material to thermal and catalytic pyrolysis (500-600 C) to characterise liquid fuel yields from this otherwise burned or landfilled agricultural waste stream.

Agriculture generates non-recyclable mixed waste streams, such as plastic (netting, twine, and film) and lignocellulosic residues (bluegrass straw/chaff), which are currently disposed of by burning or landfilling. Thermochemical conversion technologies of agricultural mixed waste (AMW) are an option to upcycle this waste into transportation fuel. In this work, AMW was homogenized by compounding in a twin-screw extruder and the material was characterized by chemical and thermal analyses. The homogenized AMW was thermally and catalytically pyrolyzed (500–600 °C) in a tube batch reactor, and the products, including gas, liquid, and char, were characterized using a combination of FTIR, GC-MS, and ESI-MS. Thermal pyrolysis wax products were mainly a mixture of straight-chain hydrocarbons C7 to C44 and oxygenated compounds. Catalytic pyrolysis using zeolite Y afforded liquid products comprised of short-chain hydrocarbons and aromatics C6 to C23. The results showed a high degree of similarity between the chemical profiles of catalytic pyrolysis products and gasoline.

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