J. Anal. Appl.

Pyrolysis 74 (2005) 282289

www.elsevier.com/locate/jaap

Thermal and catalytic decomposition behavior of PVC

mixed plastic waste with petroleum residue
Mohammad Farhat Ali, Mohammad Nahid Siddiqui *
Department of Chemistry, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia

Received 24 June 2004; accepted 17 December 2004

Available online 9 March 2005

Abstract

The pyrolysis and hydropyrolysis of PVC mixed plastic waste alone and with petroleum residue was carried out at 150 and 350 8C under
N2 gas and at 430 8C under 6.5 MPa H2 gas pressure. The behavior of plastic waste during thermal and catalytic decomposition has also been
studied in single- and two-stage reaction processes. In the individual pyrolysis process, both the petroleum residue and polystyrene (PS)
undergo more than 90% conversion to liquid and gaseous products, whereas low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and high-density polyethylene
(HDPE) yielded lower conversions products, and polypropylene (PP) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) afforded somewhere a moderate to high
conversion products.
In a single-stage pyrolysis reaction, PVC was processed with petroleum residue at 150 and 430 8C, under N2 gas for 1 h at each
temperature in a glass reactor. The model PVC and waste PVC showed slight variations in the products distribution obtained from the glass
reactor. In two-stage process, model PVC, vacuum gas oil (VGO) and a number of different catalysts were used in a stainless steel autoclave
micro tubular reactor at 350 8C under the stream of N2 gas for 1 h and at 430 8C under 950 psi (6.5 MPa) H2 pressure for the duration of 2 h.
Significantly, different products distributions were obtained. Among the catalysts used, fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) and hydrocracking
catalysts (HC-1) were most effective in producing liquid fuel (hexane soluble) materials. The study shows that the catalytic coprocessing of
PVC with VGO is a feasible process by which PVC and VGO materials can be converted into transportation fuels.
# 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: PVC; Thermal and catalytic degradation; Fuel oils; Coprocessing; Residue upgrading

1. Introduction
The disposal of waste plastics has become a major
environmental problem all over the world. USA, Europe and
Japan generate about 50 million tons of post consumer
plastic waste material. Saudi Arabia is one of the major
producers of plastic in the world with total production
capacity of around six million metric tons per year. The
amount of plastic wastes in Saudi Arabia is about 15 wt% in
the composition of domestic municipality waste [1]. The
number of landfill sites is decreasing. Also land filling could
result in plastic additives such as phthalates and various dyes
polluting ground water. Incineration is an alternative to
landfill disposal of plastic wastes, but this practice could
result in the formation of unacceptable emissions of gases
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +966 3860 2529; fax: +966 3860 4277.
E-mail address: mnahid@kfupm.edu.sa (M.N. Siddiqui).
such as nitrous oxide, sulfur oxides, dusts, dioxins and other
toxins. The option of secondary recycling or mechanical
recycling, which is the reprocessing of plastic waste into
new plastic products with a lower quality level, is not
showing any signs of growth in the recycling industry.
Tertiary recycling, which returns plastics to their constituent
monomers or to their higher value hydrocarbon feed stock
and fuel oil, is gaining momentum as an alternative method.
Tertiary recycling includes all those processing which
attempt to convert the plastic wastes to basic chemicals by
the use of chemical reactions such as hydrolysis, metha-
nolysis and ammonoloysis for condensation polymers and to
fuels with conventional refinery processes such as pyrolysis,
gasification, hydrocracking, catalytic cracking, coking and
visbreaking for addition polymers excluding PVC. Pyrolysis
of waste plastic affords high rates of conversion into liquid
fuels that can be used as feedstock in refinery. There has
been a lot of research work on the pyrolysis of individual

0165-2370/$ see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jaap.2004.12.010
 M.F. Ali, M.N. Siddiqui / J. Anal. Appl. Pyrolysis 74 (2005) 282289
and mixed plastics with and without PVC into liquid fuels
[24].
One of the main problems in the pyrolysis of PVC and
mixed plastics containing PVC is the production of
hydrogen chloride, chloro organic and inorganic com-
pounds during the early stages of pyrolysis process. The
presence of such chloro compounds in the liquid products
of pyrolysis are highly undesirable; therefore efforts were
made to remove these halogen contents prior to pyrolysis
of the waste plastics into liquid fuel products [57]. The
behavior and the chemical nature of mixed plastics
containing PVC are very important parameters to be
known before carrying out dechlorination process. The
kinetic studies on the decomposition of various individual
and mixed plastics revealed that different molecular
structures of the plastics undergo different reaction
mechanisms of decomposition, follow different reaction
rates and shows a different and great temperature
dependency of the decomposition rate [8,9]. These studies
suggest that the dechlorination of PVC occurs at relatively
low temperatures via free radical mechanism. This
tendency prompts the use of a combination of separation
and decomposition of plastic waste in stepwise pyrolysis
with different temperatures in the preliminary step for the
dechlorination of PVC. During the dechlorination step, the
rechlorination of other components of the product mixture
must also be checked and avoided.
In this work, we report the pyrolysis of PVC mixed
plastic waste alone and coprocessed with petroleum residue.
The behavior of plastic waste during thermal and catalytic
decomposition has also been studied in single- and two-
stage reaction processes. The product distributions and the
effect of catalyst types on percent conversion of plastics into
liquid fuels are discussed.
2. Experimental
2.1. Materials
2.1.1. Polymers
The model plastic compounds, polystyrene (PS), low
density polyethylene (LDPE), high density polyethylene
(HDPE), polypropylene (PP), polyethylene terephthalate
(PET) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) used in this study were
obtained from Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC),
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and were used as received. Municipal
waste plastic (MWP) for PVC was collected locally as used
water pipes and prepared in the laboratory by chopping and
mixing for the reactions.
2.1.2. Petroleum residue
It is an atmospheric bottom residue from Arab light crude
oil supplied by Saudi Aramcos Ras Tanura refinery. Arab
light crude was found to contain a substantial amount of low
boiling material (about 8% of <350 8C distillate). The
283
atmospheric bottoms sample was charged to a wiped-film
molecular still (Pope Scientific, Menomonee Fall, WI, USA)
and more volatile part of the feed was progressively
vaporized to remove the material boiling below 350 8C. This
atmospheric bottom petroleum residue (350 8C+) was used
with plastics in single-stage coprocessing reactions whereas
a distillate fraction of the same petroleum residue with
boiling range of 325500 8C, called vacuum gas oil (VGO),
was used in the two-stage coprocessing reactions.
2.1.3. Catalysts
The following eight different catalysts were obtained
from the manufacturers and used in this work: hydro
cracking catalysts (HC-1, HC-2 and HC-3), ZSM-5 zeolite
catalyst, FCC catalyst, presulfided NiMo/Al2O3 (NiMo)
catalyst and iron oxide carbon composite catalyst. Selection
of suitable catalysts for the cracking reactions was the
difficult task due to limitations in terms of operating
conditions, feedstock properties, catalyst performance and
desired products. The suitability of catalysts was based on
these essential characteristics: activity, selectivity, ease of
regeneration and mechanical strength. The catalyst selection
for this study is based mainly on the results obtained in our
previous work [2].
2.2. Analytical procedure
The procedure can be explained in two parts: first to
determine the HCl contents in PVC and secondly the fuel oil
formation in the form of hexane, toluene and THF solubles
in the reaction material.
A stock solution of 1 M NaOH was prepared and
standardized using potassium hydrogen phthalate solution in
order to obtain the exact concentration of NaOH solution
that was found to be 0.96 M.
Fig. 1 shows the schematic of a fixed-bed pyrolytic gas-
purged glass reactor used to pyrolyze the PVC plastics.
The reactor is a Pyrex glass tube with 32 cm length and
2 cm i.d. The samples were placed inside the tube before
reaction started. A programmable temperature controller
controlled the furnace. This enabled the samples to be
heated slowly at the rate of 5 8C/min until temperature
reaches to 150 8C. This temperature was maintained for 1 h
to ensure that all HCl gas was evolved. Then heating was
increased at the same rate to the final pyrolysis temperature
of 430 8C. The sample was held at 430 8C for another hour
or until there was no significant evolution of gases. The
liquid oil phase was trapped in a cylindrical flask using a
cold-water spiral condenser. Nitrogen gas was used as the
carrier gas at a fixed flow rate to sweep the evolved gaseous
products quickly. The gases evolved, except HCl, were not
collected so no gas analysis was performed. Initially,
200 ml of standard NaOH solution was used to trap and
determine the amount of HCl gas produced from the
pyrolysis. At the end of the reaction, the glass reactor was
cooled and weight of the reactor and the cylindrical flask
284 M.F. Ali, M.N. Siddiqui / J. Anal. Appl. Pyrolysis 74 (2005) 282289
Fig. 1. Schematic experimental setup of glass reactor.
were recorded. Then the liquid product was dissolved in
three different solvents successively hexane, toluene and
THF. A separation procedure for the product distribution of
reactions is shown in Fig. 2.
Two-stage reactions were carried out in a 25 cm3
stainless steel tubular micro reactor with a programmable
temperature controller obtained from the Parr Scientific,
USA. The reactor was gradually heated at the rate of 5 8C/
min and temperature was kept at 350 8C for 1 h under the
nitrogen and gases evolved were purged into standard
NaOH trap solution. Fig. 3 shows the schematic of
experimental setup used for the first-stage that is also
Fig. 2. A separation scheme for the products distribution.
called dechlorination step. There was no significant
evolution of gases after 1 h of reaction. Then the reactor
was cooled to room temperature keeping under nitrogen.
The air trap and NaOH trap solution were removed from
the reactor assembly and the nitrogen flow was cut off for
the second-stage reaction as shown in Fig. 4. At this stage,
the dechlorinated reactor contents were pressurized at
ambient temperature to 6.5 MPa (950 psi) with hydrogen
gas. The reactor was heated to 430 8C and the temperature
maintained for 2 h. The micro reactor was agitated by a
built-in mechanical stirrer and heated with a temperature
controlled built-in heater. Different ratios of PVC, VGO
and catalysts were charged to the reactor and reactions
were performed using single and double components to
evaluate the reactivity and interactive effects among the
reactants. The single reactions were studied for: LDPE,
HDPE, PS, PP, PET, PVC and petroleum residue while the
double component reactions were studied only for residue/
VGO and PVC mixtures. All reactions were run in
duplicate. The gaseous, liquid and solid products were
separated and analyzed by the solvent fractionation
methods.
The solubility and thermal analysis of each plastic was
carried out separately. The reactions of single and binary
systems using different plastics and residue/VGO were
experimented at different temperatures, under nitrogen gas
and hydrogen gas pressure and time duration. The best
results, based on the percent conversion to liquid products,
were obtained at 430 8C, 950 psi (6.5 MPa) and 120 min
duration in two-stage process. These optimum conditions
were used in our studies. After the reaction, liquid and solid
products were analyzed by solvent fractionation using a
series of solvents. The fractions obtained were hexane-
soluble materials (HXs); toluene-soluble, hexane-insoluble
material (TOLs); THF-soluble, toluene-insoluble material
 M.F. Ali, M.N. Siddiqui / J. Anal. Appl. Pyrolysis 74 (2005) 282289 285

Fig. 3. Schematic experimental setup of micro reactor with continuous flow of N2 gas.

(THFs); and THF-insoluble material called as insoluble The solubility of the unreacted materials was also
organic material (IOM). The masses of the gas, HXs, TOLs, obtained using solvent fractionation.
and THFs fractions were determined after the fractioning The recovery of the products from these reactions was
solvent was removed by rotary evaporation and the fractions defined as
were air-dried. The wt% of each of these fractions was  
g of output
determined and then the percent of the gas fraction was %Recovery  100 (1)
g of input
determined by difference as:
where, output = weight of gases + liquids + IOM products,
%Gas 100  HXs TOLs THFs IOM HCl input = weight of plastics + residue/VGO + catalyst

Fig. 4. Schematic experimental setup of micro reactor under H2 gas pressure.

286 M.F. Ali, M.N. Siddiqui / J. Anal. Appl. Pyrolysis 74 (2005) 282289

Percent conversion of plastics and residue was calculated
from the following expression
 
g of IOM
%Conversion 1   100 (2)
g of total charge
Percent conversion includes conversion of total charge
(plastics + residue) into gases and liquids products that is
called pyrolysis oils.
3. Results and discussion
3.1. Properties of PVC
Plastics (LDPE, HDPE, PP, PS, and PET) in general and
PVC in particular are a major thermoplastic material used in
a very wide variety of applications and products. In physical
appearance PVC resin is a white, fairly inert powder at room
temperature, although it is heat sensitive. The molecular
weight of the PVC polymer can be varied during the
polymerization stage. The number average molecular
weight (Mn) range varies from between about 30,000 to
95,000. The properties of PVC are influenced by its average
molecular weight and its molecular weight distribution.
Some of the characteristics properties of the PVC provided
by the manufacturer are given here as: tensile strength
2.60 N/mm2, notched impact strength 2.045 kJ/m2, thermal
coefficient of expansion 80  106, Max Cont use
temperature 60 8C and density 1.38 g/cm3. Commercial
PVC polymers are essentially amorphous, but they also have
a crystalline phase amounting to around 10% of the matrix.
The glass transition temperature phase lies in the range of
7080 8C.
materials, called asphaltenes, in hexane but was more than
99% soluble in toluene and THF solvents.
Each available plastic used in this study was pyrolyzed
individually at the optimum reaction conditions obtained
earlier. Table 2 shows the product distributions obtained
from the thermal pyrolysis of the plastics and petroleum
residue. The conversion for the single component reactions
shows that under similar conditions of pyrolysis both
petroleum residue and PS undergo more than 90%
conversion to gaseous and liquid products whereas LDPE
and HDPE yielded lower conversions and PP remained in
the moderate to high conversion. PVC has highest
conversion to gases that includes formation of hydrogen
chloride gas. PVC produces hydrogen chloride as a main gas
on pyrolysis. The CCl bond in PVC structure has relatively
lower bond energy than CC and CH bonds in the structure,
hence on heating CCl bond dissociates first. As a result,
thermal degradation of PVC begins around 150 8C, with the
evolution of hydrogen chloride gas due to the intermolecular
chain-transfer reaction. This process leads to the dehydro-
chlorination of PVC. A virgin PVC plastic contains a total of
56.7% chlorine by weight and in our experiment it was
achieved 54.855.6% in virgin PVC and 53.3% in waste
PVC. It indicates that the reaction conditions followed in this
experiment for the dechlorination were working satisfacto-
rily. The dechlorination of PVC by a free radical chain
mechanism occurs at relatively low temperatures. This
tendency suggests a stepwise pyrolysis of mixed plastics at
various temperatures using a combination of separation and
decomposition in the single steps including dechlorination
of PVC.
3.3. Reactions using glass reactor

3.2. Solubility and degradative properties of plastics
Studies were performed to establish the solubility
properties of unreacted materials. Table 1 shows the
solubility behavior of petroleum residue and six model
plastics (LDPE, HDPE, PP, PET, PS and PVC) produced by
SABIC, Saudi Arabia. Initially LDPE, HDPE, PET and PP
were primarily insoluble in these solvents, while PVC and
PS were completely soluble in hexane, toluene and THF.
The petroleum residue contained about 6% insolubles
The effects of temperature, time duration and hydrogen gas
pressure on the product distribution of coprocessing of PVC
with petroleum residue were studied in single-stage reactions.
The reactions were performed at two different temperatures
(150 and 430 8C) for the durations of 1 h each and the results
are given in Table 3. The model PVC and waste PVC showed
slight variations in the products distribution obtained from the
glass reactor. The model PVC has produced 16.9% liquid oil
product in comparison to waste PVC with 12.1%. The model
PVC also produced 54.1% hydrogen chloride gas while waste

Table 1
Products distribution from unreacted plastics
Material % Weight % Soluble % Recovery
Hexane soluble Toluene soluble THF soluble IOM
LDPE 0.59 4.97 2.08 92.36 7.64 99.98
HDPE 0.22 1.12 1.74 96.92 3.08 99.99
PET 0.66 1.12 0.85 97.37 2.63 99.99
PS 0.57 99.43 0.00 0.00 100 99.99
PP 0.79 2.34 1.65 95.22 4.78 99.99
PVC 0.15 6.20 93.65 0.00 100 99.99
Petroleum residue 94.20 5.80 0.00 0.00 100 99.99
 M.F. Ali, M.N. Siddiqui / J. Anal. Appl. Pyrolysis 74 (2005) 282289 287

Table 2
Products distribution from the pyrolysis of plastics
Product distribution % % Conversion % Recovery
Gas Hexane soluble Toluene soluble THF soluble IOM
HDPE 2.6 11.0 6.5 3.5 76.4 23.6 99.3
LDPE 1.9 15.4 6.5 5.7 70.5 29.5 98.1
PS 5.0 71.2 13.8 0.0 10.0 90.0 99.3
PP 2.1 30.6 14.7 19.2 33.4 66.6 98.4
PVC 51.3 3.6 9.7 4.5 30.9 69.1 97.9
Petroleum residue 10.3 61.5 15.2 7.9 5.1 94.9 99.0
% Conversion: conversion of plastics/petroleum residue into gases and pyrolysis oils.

Table 3
Products distribution from single-stage pyrolysis of mixture
Products PVC (10 g) PVC waste (10 g) PVC + iron oxide catalyst (10 g + 0.5 g) Petroleum residue (10 g) PVC + Petroleum residue (4 g + 6 g)
Liquid 16.9 12.1 11.1 77.1 43.8
HCl 54.1 51.5 50.6 00.0 20.6
Gas 0.7 1.8 1.6 4.9 4.4
IOM 28.1 34.2 36.6 17.5 30.2
Total 99.8 99.6 99.9 99.5 99.0
Reaction conditions: 1 h at 150 8C + 1 h at 430 8C both under the stream of N2 gas.

PVC produced 51.5%. Over all these results are within the
expected range of hydrogen chloride contents of the PVC. The
conversions of the model and waste PVC into gaseous and
liquid products were found to be 71.9 and 63.8%, respectively.
One batch of petroleum residue was also charged and found to
decompose into 77.1% liquid oils and 4.9% gaseous products.
The model PVC was also pyrolyzed with 5% iron-oxide
composite carbon catalyst at 350 8C for 2 h and results were
not significantly different from non-catalytic reactions. It
indicates that this catalyst is not effective for the conversion of
PVC alone into liquid fuel products. In another experiment,
when PVC and petroleum residue (40:60 wt%) were
pyrolyzed under similar conditions, the results obtained were
very interesting. The liquid oil product contents jumped to
43.8% and hydrogen chloride gas contents reduced to 20.6%
but there were also very significant percent of IOM left. The
loss of HCl contents could be attributed to the reactions taking
place between asphaltenes of petroleum residue and chloride
radical evolved from the cracking of PVC before the formation
of HCl gas [10]. The chlorination of asphaltenes appears to be
taking place very rapidly as indicated by the lower amounts of
hydrogen chloride gas formed during the reaction. This also
shows a very high tendency of asphaltenes towards reactions
with chlorine. The presence of petroleum residue, however,
increased the overall conversion in the binary coprocessing
reactions compared to the single component reaction. In view
of this, the need of carrying out degradation reactions in two-
stages, first dechlorination of PVC then followed by catalytic
cracking of the dechlorinated residue to liquid products, was
considered.
3.4. Two-stage reactions using micro reactor
In two-stage process, model PVC, VGO and a number of
different catalysts were used in a stainless steel autoclave
micro tubular reactor at 350 8C under the stream of N2 gas
for 1 h and at 430 8C under 950 psi (6.5 MPa) H2 pressure
for the duration of 2 h. Significantly different products

Table 4
Products distribution from two-stage pyrolysis of mixture
Exp. no. Reactants HXNs TOLs THFs IOM *HCl GAS
1 PVC + iron oxide catalyst 6.8 4.3 0.0 36.6 50.6 1.6
2 VGO + ZSM-5 70.5 4.2 0.0 9.5 0.0 15.8
3 VGO + PVC + ZSM-5 61.3 6.5 1.3 10.8 8.3 (54) 11.8
4 VGO + PVC + NiMo 61.5 6.2 1.8 9.8 7.9 (51.3) 12.8
5 VGO + PVC + FCC 65.9 7.1 1.8 10.2 8.1 (52.6) 6.9
6 VGO + PVC + HC-1 65.2 7.9 1.7 10.7 7.8 (50.7) 6.7
7 VGO + PVC + iron oxide catalyst 55.0 8.5 2.6 16.0 7.7 (50) 10.2
8 VGO + PVC + HC-2 59.0 7.1 2.1 13.0 7.8 (50.7) 11.0
9 VGO + PVC + HC-3 60.1 6.7 1.9 14.1 7.6 (49.4) 9.6
Note: Exp. 1: PVC 10 g, catalyst 0.5 g; Exp. 2: VGO 12.5 g, catalyst 1.25 g; Exp. 39: VGO 12.5 g, PVC 2.5 g, catalyst 1.25 g. Figures in parenthesis under
*HCl are %HCl content of PVC. Yield calculation basis: wt%. GAS = 100  (HXs + TOLs + THFs + IOM + HCl). HCl = NaOH titration. Reaction
conditions: 1 h at 350 8C under N2 gas + 2 h at 430 8C under 6.5 MPa H2 gas.
288 M.F. Ali, M.N. Siddiqui / J. Anal. Appl. Pyrolysis 74 (2005) 282289

Fig. 5. Selective product distributions obtained from the pyrolytic process of the mixed reactants.

distributions were obtained as shown in Table 4. Catalytic
decomposition of VGO alone afforded 70.5% hexane
soluble, 4.2% toluene soluble and 9.5% IOM. Fig. 5
compares the effect of different catalyst on the distributions
of gas, IOM and HCl obtained from PVC/VGO mixture.
FCC and hydrocracking catalysts (HC-1) produced mini-
mum amount of gases while NiMo catalyst gave the highest.
The IOM produced in each of the reaction system after the
completion of reaction was in substantial amount. The
amount of IOM obtained from the reaction mixture was
around 10% in almost all of the reaction products except
when iron oxide; HC-2 and HC-3 catalysts were used. This
trend indicates that these catalysts are cracking the PVC/
VGO mixture most efficiently and effectively. The proper
determination of HCl amount is also very important in this
study because chlorine plays an important role in converting
PVC to useful ends. Again the lower recovery of HCl in two
hydrocracking and iron oxide catalysts mixtures may partly
due to the lower cracking of mixed plastics that led to the
increase of IOM amount.
Fig. 6 compares the distribution of liquid products
mainly, HXs, TOLs, and THFs; obtained from PVC/VGO

Fig. 6. Selective product distribution obtained from the pyrolysis of mixed reactants.
 M.F. Ali, M.N. Siddiqui / J. Anal. Appl. Pyrolysis 74 (2005) 282289
mixture using different catalysts. As expected, THFs were
found to be lowest in amount followed by TOLs and HXs
were found to be in highest amount and this is most
important liquid product. Among the various catalysts used,
FCC and HC-1 catalysts were most effective in producing
hexane soluble fraction. Iron oxide catalyst was least
effective. The hexane soluble from this initial conversion
can further be upgraded to gasoline and other high value
diesel fuels or chemical feedstock for refinery. These trends
indicate that the selection of catalyst plays a vital role in
carrying out coprocessing studies of PVC with VGO. Some
catalysts showed greater reactivity than other catalyst as
indicated by the higher percent conversion to liquid fuel
products. The effect of different catalysts on the conversions
and product distribution showed a significant improvement
when the temperature and time were changed.
4. Conclusions
The optimum conditions considered for our work were: at
350 8C under the stream of N2 gas for 1 h and at 430 8C
under 950 psi (6.5 MPa) H2 pressure for the duration of 2 h.
These optimum conditions were obtained by carrying out a
series of reactions of plastics and VGO at different
temperature, pressure and time duration. The dechlorination
process of PVC shows that the HCl gas evolved could be
quantitatively separated from the degradation products of
the plastics at lower temperatures. The effects of different
catalysts on the product distribution for PVC and VGO
systems were evaluated and the results were compared. The
presence of VGO increased the overall conversion in the
binary coprocessing reactions compared to the single
component reaction. The rate of conversion in the
coprocessing system depended upon the chemistry and
composition of the PVC, VGO and catalyst materials. The
proper mixing of plastic, residue and catalyst is also very
important. When plastic and VGO were not thoroughly
289
mixed in the reactor before the start of the reaction that
strongly affected the conversion and product slate in the
PVC/VGO reactions. It is envisaged that this problem of
mixing may become more serious when mixed plastics
wastes will be used. It shows that the catalytic coprocessing
of PVC with VGO is a feasible process by which PVC and
VGO materials can be converted into transportation fuels at
bench scale. A pilot plant study could be conducted to
evaluate the feasibility of carrying out this project on
industrial scale.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank King Fahd University of
Petroleum & Minerals for financial support to carry out this
research work under SABIC Project Grant SAB-2002/08.
The help provided by Mr. M. Mazhar Hasan in the
experimental work is also gratefully acknowledged.
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