Fractional Distillation Process Utilized to Produce Light Fractional Fuel from Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE) Waste Plastic

Plastics are not easily biodegradable; and because of these characteristics they can remain under landfill and water for a very long period of time. All over the world only 6% of waste plastics are recycled and the rest of all waste plastics are dumped into landfills. An experiment was conducted in a laboratory scale batch process under Labconco’s fume hood utilizing low density polyethylene (LDPE). The experiment was carried out to obtain a hydrocarbon fuel product utilizing thermal degradation. Many research studies have successfully demonstrated that waste plastics such as low density polyethylene (LDPE), high density polyethylene (HDPE), polypropylene (PP) and polystyrene (PS) can be converted to valuable liquid hydrocarbon fuels. For experimental purposes we used 500 gm of LDPE as raw materials. This particular experiment is a two step process; the first step process involves extracting hydrocarbon fuels as mixture of both short and long chain hydrocarbon compounds. During the second step the fuel obtained in the first process is refractionated by thermal degradation process utilizing a distillation column. This process yields a short hydrocarbon chain liquid fuel that has similar properties to gasoline grade fuels. Analysis of these fuels was conducted by Gas Chromatography and Mass Spectrometer (GC/MS), FT-IR Spectrum 100 and Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC). The results show that the produced fuels are good quality fuels with high energy content. ASTM test result indicates that fuel has low sulfur level (3.2 ppm) and the fuel hydrocarbon range shown by GC/MS analysis is C4-C10.