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Conflict of Interest: In relation to this article, we declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Publication history: Received March 12, 2002
Accepted May 8, 2002

This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Characteristics of LDPE Pyrolysis

Jong Jin Park^† Kwinam Park Jin-Won Park Dong Chan Kim¹

Dept. of Chemical Engineering, Yonsei University, Seoul 120-749, Korea ¹Department of Energy and Environmental Research, Korea Institute of Energy Research, Daejeon 305-343, Korea

Korean Journal of Chemical Engineering, July 2002, 19(4), 658-662(5), 10.1007/BF02699313

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Abstract

Pyrolysis of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) was studied in order to relieve environmental pollution and recover the monomer or fuel. LDPE was thermally decomposed with and without catalyst. First, efficiency of oil production was analyzed according to the variation of reaction conditions such as reaction temperature, types of additives and catalyst, and contacting method. In non-catalytic LDPE pyrolysis, isothermal reaction was almost similar to non-isothermal reaction. Light oil was produced with low reaction temperature (430 ℃) in the isothermal reaction, but low heating rate caused light oil production in the non-isothermal reaction. When pyrolyzed polyethylene (PE oil) was applied as an additive, no significant effect showed in the isothermal reaction. In catalytic LDPE pyrolysis (10%NiO/S-A) with additives, efficiency greatly increased especially with polystyrene (PS) addition. It was also found that the molecular weight distribution of product oil could be controlled by applying different additives. When a catalytic reactor was used, the amount of the low molecular weight compound increased as flow rate of thermally decomposed gas was lowered.

Keywords

Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) Pyrolysis Catalysts Additives Catalytic Reactor

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