Plastic production and usage increase every year due to its low cost, practicality, and flexibility. Despite the advantages of plastics as a raw material, it represents a serious environmental problem when it becomes waste. Most of the plastic is produced from petrol. Its chemical composition provides the opportunity to be transformed into a fuel via a pyrolysis process, with or without a catalyst. The pyrolysis process yields solid, liquid and gas fractions. The liquid fraction has properties similar to those of conventional fuels and can be used in internal combustion engines. However, although fast pyrolysis is cheaper, it produces lower quality products (longer carbon chains) not suitable for these types of engines. In the present paper, main properties of oils from fast pyrolysis are analysed and compared to those of Heavy Fuel Oils (HFO) to demonstrate that they represent a feasible alternative to decrease the impact of plastics in the environment and to obtain an alternative fuel to feed a power plant.
In this work, some physical properties of several biofuels, which are used in compression ignition engines, of which no reference publications have been found, are experimentally obtained. These properties are essential when simulating engine processes such as injection and fuel spray. The measured properties are density and surface tension. Density is measured by the use of a pycnometer and surface tension by means of commercial equipment (Krüss-EasyDyne). Diesel fuel, biodiesel, as well as biodiesel-ethanol blends are tested. Density and surface tension are quantified, verifying that the density is proportional to the concentration of each fuel in the blend. Nevertheless, this is not the case of the surface tension, which fits a second-order polynomial.
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