Abstract for presentation at 14th IUAPPA World Congress

Many efforts have been paid to develop potentially available technologies to produce alternative fuels since the price of barreled crude oil is getting higher due to the shortage of crude oil. Besides, the traditional oil refinery processes, emitting a huge amount of air pollutants (i.e. CO₂, SO₂, and etc.), result in environmental problems such as global warming, acid precipitation, and climate change. Therefore, this study focused on evaluating the possibility of producing low-sulfur alternative fuels derived from waste tires and investigating the influences of major operating parameters on the physicochemical properties of pyrolysis products (i.e. carbon black, pyrolysis oil, and combustible gas), particularly the sulfur content of the pyrolysis oil, in order to obtain the optimal operation condition for producing high quality alternative fuels. A bench-scale pyrolysis reactor was designed to pyrolyze the waste tires to produce alternative fuels for this particular study. The pyrolysis tests were conducted at the pyrolysis temperature of 400-700 ^oC, the pyrolysis duration of 0-90 min, and the carrier gas flowrate of 0.3-0.9 l/min. Experimental results indicated that the yields for carbon black, pyrolysis oil, and combustible gas were 30-40%, 25-45%, and 20-40%, respectively, at the pyrolysis temperature of 400-700 ^oC. The sulfur content of pyrolysis oil increased with the pyrolysis temperature while the sulfur content of pyrolysis oil firstly decreased and then increased as the flowrate of carrier gas increased. However, the pyrolysis duration had no significant influence on the sulfur content of pyrolysis oil.