How to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel cheaply

[jonathan]

sealent

Thanks beyond biodisiel

[Beyond Biodiesel]

Thanks, jonathan, for your recent links to high temperature sealants. It is very useful having such information on this thread. I find just plain old sodium works great as a high temperature sealants, and is usually the active ingredient in most high temperature sealants.

[jonathan]

high tempreture sealent

l find another high tempreture sealent on ebay it may be help for others l dont know if it is cheap or not for other country



1 x HIGH TEMPERATURE 1200'C ADHESIVE GLUE FOR EXHAUST FIREPLACE OVENS COLLECTORS | eBay

[Beyond Biodiesel]

I thought car bumpers were ABS, not sure if recycling them is as strait forward
as HDPE and PP. Please read the whole thread. Good luck

69furball69, if the bumpers are indeed ABS, instead of PP, then you are definitely going to want to stay away from cracking it into fuel.

Even if you succeeded in not killing yourself, and everyone else within 50 feet of your pyrolysis unit, then the fuel that you get out of cracking ABS, or any other halogenated hydrocarbon, is likely to ruin the seals in any injector pump that uses your fuel in excess of 3%. So, why bother?

[mercedes 308]

It's going to take me a while to read all the posts but what we have is car bumpers.

I thought car bumpers were ABS, not sure if recycling them is as strait forward
as HDPE and PP. Please read the whole thread. Good luck

[rozier56]

Thks mjohonson for the correction in yield,taking density into account, i forgot to do that in the excitement of the occasion.Still i feel goood!!!

[mjohnson1]

69furball69

You're going to want a shredder or at the very least cut up the bumpers because trying to stuff bumpers like that into a retort is going to end up with a lot of wasted space.

For your retort you can weld one up out of some mild steel or find a large empty tank. Make sure to test for leaks using water/air.

[mjohnson1]

Sorry to create hot debate, but these are my figures,
LDPE input--21.5 kg
coke/waste--1.2kg
diesel recovered--19.7 lt.
You tell me the%?

19.7 liters * .832 ( density of diesel lt/kg) = 16.4 kg of fuel

16.4/21.5 = ~76% conversion rate.

Just like my test

[Beyond Biodiesel]

Sorry to create hot debate, but these are my figures,
LDPE input--21.5 kg
coke/waste--1.2kg
diesel recovered--19.7 lt.
You tell me the%?

Thanks, rozier56, and mjohnson1 for posting your results. Looks like you two are doing well.

Welcome 69furball69, I have seen some of your videos on YouTube. It sounds like you have the right feed stock, so all you have to do is build yourself a pyrolysis unit. There is no single post here that sums up the process. I have built a forum around pyrolysis of hydrocarbons and organized it by topic, so you should easily find what you need to build a pyrolysis unit.

[rozier56]

Sorry to create hot debate, but these are my figures,
LDPE input--21.5 kg
coke/waste--1.2kg
diesel recovered--19.7 lt.
You tell me the%?

[69furball69]

It's going to take me a while to read all the posts but what we have is car bumpers. We remanufacture the cores that we get back from sales, but the ones that are too far damaged we have no use for and have to dispose of, hence the dump fees.

If we can turn that into income or fuel, that would be great, and lessen the environmental impact.

As mentioned before, we take a fully loaded F350 lift box full to the dump every week full of bumpers.

If anyone can point me to a post that describes a method for this volume I would appreciate it... 90 + pages is a lot to read.

I have experience with waste oil forge burners, babington burners, building propane and natural gas burners, and heat treating.

YOu can look up my username on youtube. Here's a link to my WMO burning forge: Knife Makers Waste Oil Forge Burning Very Well - YouTube And to my custom babington burner: Firing the Babington Waste Oil Burner - YouTube and to a heat treating forge: New Heat Treat Forge First Firing - YouTube And to some knives I have made: All I Can Say Is That My Knife Is Pretty Plain - YouTube

I have many varied interests, so not all of my 100+ videos are related but some are.

Thanks.

[69furball69]

Hey all,

New member here.

I'm always trying to find ways to reduce costs for my employer.

This is a winner.

We have a minimum of 250 Kgs of waste plastic, mostly PP, per week that we PAY to take to the dump so even if we spend $100.00 to get $80.00 of fuel, we are still ahead. We have heavy requirement for continual heating of electroplating tanks so we could use the recovered fuel to do at least some of that heating as well as ambient heating of the shops in general.

Wow!

Really impressed with this post!

[mjohnson1]

Beyond Biodiesel
All the below results are pyrolysis of HDPE.

For thermal w/ no reflux I am getting ~77% yield by weight. Product is wax and is useless.

With a reflux I get ~79% yield by weight. Product is a little cloudy at room temp and when brought to freezing point of water waxes start to appear. Certainly not a high quality fuel.

With a catalyst my best yield is 88.5% to date. In order to get high yields you need a less active catalyst. An important aspect is suppressing the creation of gasses because even in thermal pyrolysis yield to gasses is at least 10-15%. I'm also working on "upgrading" the end fuel to get a better quality fuel.

I'm trying to get to the 90% mark with 9% offgases and 1% coke. I feel this would bring a great liquid yield and give enough offgas to run the pyrolysis process.

I've also tested adding in plastic to an already hot bed of sand/catalyst. Surprisingly, the fuel yields are much lower.

[Beyond Biodiesel]

Beyond Biodiesel

My thermal pyrolysis yields are far less than my best catalyst formula even with a reflux.

What kind of yields are you getting?

So far I have only fractionated WMO and I get mostly motor oil (maybe 60-75%) in my yields, but I get hydraulic oil, diesel, kerosene and gasoline in successively smaller proportions, so I do not think there is a lot of cracking going on in my pyrolysis unit.

On the other hand, I bring up the temperature slowly, to reduce boil-over. Doing so will drive off the fractions, from light to heavy, in order. Then, the last is motor oil, and it does not seem to be cracking, because I have monitored closely my condenser activity and the light fractions come off significantly early, but some comes off all of the way through the batch, but arguably, that is most likely from cracking.

I find this interesting because a catalyst is just suppose to speed up the reactor or change the fuel types but i'm getting more fuel with catalysts.

Well, the function of a catalysts in petroleum refining is it breaks up the longer chains into smaller ones, so it seems reasonable to me that you would get more fuel, than heavy fractions, when running a catalyst.

[Excalibur]

Oh Ok, sorry. It was wmo last week. Looks like he's been busy