Abstract
The disposal of waste from electrical and electronic equipment is an actual problem of industrialized countries. In the present work, thermal decomposition of different materials has been studied in a thermobalance at different heating rates. Kinetic models are proposed for the pyrolysis, gasification and combustion of crushed wood pellets (CWP), halogen-free electrical wires (EWs) and printed circuit boards (PCBs). Three different heating rates were used at each atmosphere condition. One set of parameters can explain all the experiments at the different atmospheres and at the three different heating rates used. In the case of CWP, a model considering three independent first-order reactions gave very good correlations all the heating rates tested both in inert and oxidant atmosphere. The decomposition of synthetic materials (EW and PCB) is modeled by using nth order kinetics. On the other hand, mixtures of these three materials have been prepared and tested for decomposition behavior. A weighted sum of the curves simulated using kinetics of the materials separately gives a good concordance with the experimental curve in the case of PCBs, indicating that there is not chemical interaction between CWP and PCBs when heated and decomposed. This would indicate that the production of pollutants in the decomposition will not be affected by the presence of the other material. Nevertheless, a strong interaction is found with the mixtures between biomass and EW.
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Acknowledgements
Support for this work was provided Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport and by the CTQ2013-41006-R project from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Spain) and the PROMETEOII/2014/007 project from the Valencian Community Government (Spain).
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Conesa, J.A., Soler, A. Decomposition kinetics of materials combining biomass and electronic waste. J Therm Anal Calorim 128, 225–233 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10973-016-5900-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10973-016-5900-1