How to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel cheaply

[mjohnson1]

rozier56

Nice work. Do you know what your % yield was by weight?

If you could post some pictures of your setup i'm sure we could all benefit.

Best of luck!

[Beyond Biodiesel]

SUCCESS!!! I made my first 20lt of diesel today.pure gold in colour and runs in the car perfectly.This is after reading 1000 plus threads and in between the line's.Perserverance will make you a winner.
Note! no catalyst used yet, will try in future batches.Raw material used was LDPE black irrigation pipe.
Will keep post ongoing as we progress.

Good work. Hydrocarbons just crack on their own if you get them up to 800F (425c), so that is why you did not need a catalyst to crack your LDPE. You may find using a catalyst in your pyrolysis unit is just too much work, or maybe not.

[rozier56]

Thks guys,just making some changes to the burner system to improve efficiency.No catalyst but i believe the trick is my reflux column.Yield was a great 96%, not bad for a first timer.

[mjohnson1]

Thks guys,just making some changes to the burner system to improve efficiency.No catalyst but i believe the trick is my reflux column.Yield was a great 96%, not bad for a first timer.

96% yield by volume?

[jonathan]

Great work rozier 56 good luck if you can post photos .it will be help for others. Thank-you

[Beyond Biodiesel]

96% yield by volume?

It would have to be by weight, because ti is mostly air between all of the pieces of plastics in the pyrolysis unit. 96% yield is about as good as one can expect. The rest will be coke, which is the byproduct of cracking, and some dirt that makes its way into the unit.

[mjohnson1]

It would have to be by weight, because ti is mostly air between all of the pieces of plastics in the pyrolysis unit. 96% yield is about as good as one can expect. The rest will be coke, which is the byproduct of cracking, and some dirt that makes its way into the unit.

I've ran 150+ tests and never broke 90% by weight. Thermal pyrolysis alone doesn't yield 96% by weight which is why I ask. If he's putting in 10kg of plastic and getting 9.6kg of fuel then there's no reason why me and many others test catalysts at both the backyard level and commercial level.

In addition, there are hundreds of scientific journals on pyrolysis and none that i've found relating to thermal pyrolysis get to the 90% mark even with a reflux.

[Excalibur]

putting in 10kg of plastic and getting 9.6kg of fuel

You have missed the fact that rozier is currently cracking wmo.

[Beyond Biodiesel]

I've ran 150+ tests and never broke 90% by weight. Thermal pyrolysis alone doesn't yield 96% by weight which is why I ask. If he's putting in 10kg of plastic and getting 9.6kg of fuel then there's no reason why me and many others test catalysts at both the backyard level and commercial level.

In addition, there are hundreds of scientific journals on pyrolysis and none that i've found relating to thermal pyrolysis get to the 90% mark even with a reflux.

I thought 96% was a bit rich, but considering that most of us are backyard enthusiasts, then a 6% error was reasonable. In fact we could all expect a 10% in any of our measurements, so let us not be too critical of the less significant numbers.

Also, since you brought up that thermal pyrolysis will yield about 90%, that practice should be good enough for most of us. To get another 5% commercial petroleum refineries have to do back flips, but those back flips are worth millions of dollars when you are processing millions of gallons of petroleum.

However, for most of us here we are happy with 5 gallons (20L) of fuel production a day. So, I see no point in investing a great deal of time and effort to squeeze another quart (liter) of fuel out of my feed stocks.

You have missed the fact that rozier is currently cracking wmo.

Thanks, Excalibur, for paying attention to the small details. However, is message was as follows:

SUCCESS!!! I made my first 20lt of diesel today.pure gold in colour and runs in the car perfectly.This is after reading 1000 plus threads and in between the line's.Perserverance will make you a winner.
Note! no catalyst used yet, will try in future batches.Raw material used was LDPE black irrigation pipe.
Will keep post ongoing as we progress.

So, apparently he was indeed cracking LDPE; although he has posted on distilling WMO as well.

[mjohnson1]

Excalibur

He stated in his post he was processing LDPE.

Beyond Biodiesel

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

I overlooked the fact that he was processing enough plastic to get 20l of diesel. Typical scales of that size aren't as accurate as the smaller gram based scales so a degree of error like you mentioned is reasonable.

I honestly just couldn't believe what I read because i've put in so much work getting my yields high.

All my initial tests I run in a rig made of black pipe and then take the winners and run them in a glassware setup.

[Excalibur]

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

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.