Liquid Fuel Production from Pyrolysis of Waste Tires: Process Simulation, Exergetic Analysis, and Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

Scrap tire is considered to be one of the very common and significant solid wastes and its production is increasing due to the increased number of vehicles in both developed and developing countries. Initiatives are being taken to overcome the fossil fuel crisis by looking for alternatives to replace gasoline and diesel fuel. This work presents the simulation of waste tires pyrolysis process in ASPEN Plus® 8.4 where the effect of temperature on the pyrolytic oil yield was investigated. It is shown that the optimum temperature for waste tire pyrolysis in a rotary kiln reactor is around 450-550oC. Also, an exergetic analysis of the pyrolysis reactor was performed to study the performance of the process. The overall exergetic efficiency of the reactor was found to be 69.9% which is equivalent to an exergy destruction of 30.1% due to process irreversibility. Finally, life cycle assessment of the process using SimaPro 7.3.2 was conducted to find out if the process of waste tire pyrolysis is environmentally friendly. The results showed that the pyrolysis process can be considered environmentally friendly but there is room for improvement. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to investigate the effect of changing the heating fuel in the process where non-condensable gases produced in the process were utilized for heating purposes. The results showed a significant reduction on the environmental impacts due to the reduction of hazardous emissions from the process.