Abstract:
Gasification is one of promising ways to obtain useful gaseous fuel from plastic wastes. Plastic waste is considered as a good feedstock for the gasification, due to its high calorific value. Typically, plastic waste is a mixture of various types of plastics. There are a previous literatures mentioned about interaction of mixed plastic during thermal decomposition processes. This research attempted to explore interaction of mixed plastic in steam/O₂ gasification with and without the presence of NiO/dolomite catalyst. Experiments were carried out in a drop tube fixed bed reactor at 850°C for 60 min. Four types of plastics, including HDPE, LDPE, PP and PS, were used in this work. Moreover, effect of plastic type on gas yield and gas composition was investigated. The results of gasification of a single plastic with and without catalyst indicated that HDPE gave the highest gas yield while PS gave the lowest. In case of gasification of mixed plastic, the mixture with the presence of PS exhibited less gas production. However, the presence of PS more than half showed positive interaction on overall gas production, especially H2 and CO₂. Moreover, the positive interaction was observed to become more dominant when NiO/dolomite catalyst was used