University of the Punjab Conference Portal, 6th Symposium on Engineering Sciences

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Investigating Hydrocracking of Actual Waste Plastics Mixture using Composite Mesoporous Zeolite Catalysts
Dureem Munir, Mahmood Saleem, Rabya Aslam, Bilal Fareed, Muhammad Rashid Usman

Last modified: 2016-12-02

Abstract


The use of plastic products is vastly increased over the past few decades due to their extremely useful properties. This increased plastic usage results in a huge plastic waste accumulation. These plastic wastes are a source of many environmental hazards and necessitate some sort of recycling method. Hydrocracking of waste plastics is an environmentally friendly process. It is an efficient method of waste plastic conversion into high quality liquid fuels. In the present work, hydrocracking of actual waste plastics mixture is carried out and compared with the hydrocracking of virgin high density polyethylene (HDPE) using in-house composite mesoporous zeolite catalysts. The catalysts are synthesized and characterized using SEM, EDX, FTIR, py-FTIR, and N2-BET techniques. A high pressure autoclave reactor (Parr Instrument Co.) is used to evaluate the activity and selectivity of the catalysts towards the hydrocracking reaction. The experiments are performed at 400°C and at a constant initial (cold) hydrogen pressure of 20 bar. The conversion and selectivity of the reaction is assessed using solvent extraction technique and the liquid products are analyzed using gas chromatography (GC-FID). The composite zeolite catalysts have shown promising results giving significantly improved amounts of liquid products.