Performance Evaluation of Waste Plastic Oil Converter

This research aimed to evaluate the performance of the waste plastic oil converter. The equipment is a prototype model powered by electricity and utilizes a non-catalytic pyrolysis process of converting waste plastic to oil. The primary objective of the study is to identify the type of waste plastic that the equipment can process and determine its performance in terms of conversion efficiency (wt %), waste reduction efficiency (wt %) and oil recovery (ml oil/kg waste plastic). The equipment was initially tested for Type 1-Polyethylene Terephthalate, Type 2-High Density Polyethylene, Type 4-Low Density Polyethylene), Type 5-Polypropylene and Type 6 -Polystyrene. It was observed that the equipment is only capable of converting Type 5 and 6 waste plastic into oil. For the performance evaluation of the equipment, 1000g Type 5 and 1000g Type 6 waste plastic were used as feedstock. The experiments were performed separately for each of them. Five trials using 200g per trial for each type of plastic was conducted to test the equipment. The temperature at the bottom of the reactor was set to 4000C and the operating time was 2 hour per trial with 15 minutes cracking time, 1 minute vapor residence time and 1 minute vapor evacuation time. Results show that the conversion efficiency of the equipment for Type 5 was 60.90% and for Type 6 was 83.6%. Waste reduction efficiency was 94.8% for Type 5 and 95.6% for Type 6. The oil recovery of the equipment was 766 ml/kg for Type 5 and 919 ml/kg for Type 6. Thus, the waste plastic oil converter is a potential solution in reducing the amount of plastic waste due to its capability of producing oil out ofwaste Type 5 and Type 6 plastics.

Keywords – Performance Evaluation, Waste Plastic Oil Converter, Type 5 – Polypropyleneplastic, Type 6-Polystyreneplastic