Plastic into Oil?
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Joined: Nov 2008
Posts: 2,500
From: Texas, Gatesville
Plastic into Oil?
Is this a very old repost? Or what? Or was this commonly known among the interweb ninjas? Makes me wonder how efficient it really is.
http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/8/22/...ck-into-oil--2
http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/8/22/...ck-into-oil--2
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Joined: Nov 2005
Posts: 9,865
From: Magrathea/California
Anyone who's worked with plastics knows that you can vaporize most kinds of plastics with just the right temperature and you can de-polymerize with temperature and catalyst reactions. Until recently nobody has cared to complete the distillation process because it gives you nothing more than a flammable liquid of questionable utility.
The "oil" it produces is not petroleum (what most people think of as "oil"), it's also not really an oil at all or even a good base stock for much of anything. You'd have to refine it to produce much useful material. It's also an aromatic and as you could see by the ferocity with which it burns (and the black smoke) it'd be best used as a fuel for engines. Unfotunately outside the shipping industry there's not a lot of uses for it as a fuel since all land and air-craft are required by the various governments of the world to use only approved fuels. Ships use bunker oil which is basically crap that's impure and otherwise unsellable so they could put this sort of stuff to great use.
A second look also exposes a problem with scaling his technology up... it requires 1KW/h to vaporize a very small amount of plastic and that nets a pretty small amount of hydrocarbons and the process requires significant cooling to the vapor in water as well as being density separated in water so the environmental issues of using his "machine" are yet to be dealt with.
A hot plate running at 278def Fahrenheit inside an O2 free chamber with a condenser running through water should do the same thing for most consumer thermo-plastics.
AFAIK This does not work with thermo-set polymers.
The "oil" it produces is not petroleum (what most people think of as "oil"), it's also not really an oil at all or even a good base stock for much of anything. You'd have to refine it to produce much useful material. It's also an aromatic and as you could see by the ferocity with which it burns (and the black smoke) it'd be best used as a fuel for engines. Unfotunately outside the shipping industry there's not a lot of uses for it as a fuel since all land and air-craft are required by the various governments of the world to use only approved fuels. Ships use bunker oil which is basically crap that's impure and otherwise unsellable so they could put this sort of stuff to great use.
A second look also exposes a problem with scaling his technology up... it requires 1KW/h to vaporize a very small amount of plastic and that nets a pretty small amount of hydrocarbons and the process requires significant cooling to the vapor in water as well as being density separated in water so the environmental issues of using his "machine" are yet to be dealt with.
A hot plate running at 278def Fahrenheit inside an O2 free chamber with a condenser running through water should do the same thing for most consumer thermo-plastics.
AFAIK This does not work with thermo-set polymers.
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