Study of the viability of the process for hydrogen recovery from old tyre oils

In this paper, an approach to the production of hydrogen from waste rubber is proposed. The process consists in performing the pyrolysis of waste rubber to prod-ace the raw material (oils) that will be used in a gasification process with oxygen to obtain hydrogen. Tyre pyrolysis runs were experimentally performed to study the influence of temperature and reaction time on oils production, concluding that tyre pyrolysis requires low-severity process variables because at severe conditions, no improvements in conversion are obtained and a slight decrease in oils production is observed, In addition, thermodynamic calculations were performed to know the energy requirements for the oils gasification process, The equilibrium constants in terms of process pressure and temperature were calculated observing that all the processes are spontaneous and clearly lead to conversion products. The hydrogen recovery is calculated and from overall data, it is concluded that the production of hydrogen from old tyre seems to be a feasible process and a way of obtaining a clean energy for the future from a non-biodegradable waste material. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V All rights reserved.