Colloquia

Summary

Polystyrene is a very inexpensive polymer with a wide array of uses. From 2009 to 2017 out of 139 ktons of polystyrene waste less than 10 % was recycled. It is estimated that 15.68 million tons of polystyrene will be produced in year 2024. 

This graduation project is in collaboration with Pureps, a polystyrene recycling company, which in order to enter the circular polystyrene market has developed a process which starts with the compacting and flame retardant removal from the material. Next step is pyrolysis, which is the purpose of this project, and finally distillation to separate styrene from other chemicals. 

For this project polystyrene pyrolysis experiments were perfomed with a screen heater reactor at the High Pressure Lab at the University of Twente and with a 1kg/h continuous pyrolysis reactor. Aim of this project is to answer how polystyrene decomposoes back to its monomers and side products and  what are the conditions that maximize the yield of styrene. At the same time a heat tranfser model coupled with a chemical kinetics model, was developed in Python for the continuous reactor in order to find out how heat transfers in this reactor and what are the heat transfer limitations.