Production of Liquid Fuels from Vacuum Pyrolysis of Chinese Bicycle Tire Wastes

Abstract

This study is based upon fixed bed reactor under vacuum conditions by applying Chinese bicycle tire wastes as the pyrolysis feedstock. The influence of temperature on this process was investigated. It has been found that 450 ºC is the optimum temperature, at which the yield of pyrolytic oil is 45.2 wt %. The raw materials were characterized by elemental analysis and thermal gravimetric analysis, from which the major composition of bicycle tire wastes can be obtained. Pyrolytic oils were characterized by elementary analyses, FT-IR and GC-MS. These results show that the pyrolytic oil has high heat value of 41-43 MJ/kg, which can be used as potential liquid fuel after proper modification and also can extract some valueable chemical products.