Seniors design plant to turn old tires into diesel fuel
block Heading link
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration, approximately 280 million tires are discarded every year by American motorists, and only 30 million of those tires are retreaded or reused.
But what if more of those discarded tires could be reused or turned into something entirely different?
UIC chemical engineering department seniors Emily Seriruk, Shayma Abdallah, Jessica Fajardo, and Becky Listiawan simulated a plant that takes tires, thermally decomposes them, and turns them into valuable products such as diesel-like fuel and limonene. Limonene is an expensive chemical traditionally extracted from the peels of citrus fruits and is often used as a precursor to cleaning solvents and to make medicine and flavorings for food and beverages.
Using the pyrolysis process, the senior design team input the operating conditions based on those discovered in their research, such as the temperatures and pressures, and the simulation spits out what they would expect to produce in real life. Pyrolysis is the degradation of organic compounds in the absence of oxygen at very high temperatures.
“Throughout simulating the process, you run into a lot of errors, including the pressure is too high, or atoms are unbalanced,” Seriruk said. “In the end, we got our yields, i.e., how much product you produce and the flow rates coming out.”
They chose to use tires as a feedstock to create sustainable fuel to address the growing issue of landfill waste from tires.
“This process generates enough heat to power the pyrolysis unit, so we’re not using a lot of utilities,” Abdallah said. “That’s also part of the sustainability of it; so much energy is required for the actual process, but we’re making that energy combusting our byproducts.”
“We enjoyed working with our mentor because he has actual industry experience,” Fajardo said. “We also enjoyed working as a team and trying to figure out how to solve this specific problem. We were all brainstorming ways to overcome issues that would arise in our process.”
These seniors completed their project as part of a required senior design course for all College of Engineering students and will showcase their project at the annual Engineering Expo on Friday, April 19, at the Credit Union 1 Arena.