Abstract:
The pyrolysis of scrap tyre rubber crumbs under nitrogen and treatment with pure carbon dioxide was investigated both isothermally and dynamically up to 1100 °C, at heating rates up to 20 °C min−1. The rubber sample was a mixture of industrially representative tread and sidewall material. Workable, but not definitive, models could be derived from the isothermal analysis: Jander D3 diffusion for the first pyrolysis event under nitrogen up to 550 °C; the Mampel mechanism for high-temperature pyrolysis above 550 °C; and shrinking-particle chemical-reaction control as the rate limiting step for the reverse Boudouard reaction. The isothermally derived pre-exponential factors and activation energies were further refined by non-linear fitting to the dynamic data of all heating rates, and by making both parameters functions of the degree of conversion. In addition, the Sestak-Berggren equation was directly fitted to the full data set, i.e., for all heating rates, also using pre-exponential factors and activation energies that are dependent on degree of conversion. Both the approaches yielded workable engineering kinetics, with the Sestak-Berggren performing worse. With single-value pre-exponential factors and activation energies, the models fitted the data less satisfactorily across the range of heating rates. The required numerical analysis is fully implementable on a commercial spreadsheet.
