An Investigation on Thermal Recycling of Recycled Plastic Resin (Optical Analysis of Abrupt Heating Characteristics of a Micro Plastic-Resin Particle)

Abstract

To burn plastic-resin powder as an auxiliary or alternative fuel and to realize the effective thermal recycling of a great deal of recycled plastic-resin, some experimental investigations have been made on the overall combustion characteristics of plastic-powder in the industrial burner and those in the annular burner. According to these results, the basic elucidation of physical properties of an abruptly heated micro plastic-resin particle was found to be necessary and indispensable. In this paper, therefore, evaporating and burning processes of a micro plastic-resin particle, which has a diameter of about 200μm and is suddenly exposed to a hot oxidizing atmosphere, are observed and analyzed by combining the devised micro direct and schlieren system with a high-speed CCD video camera. The results show that there exist multiple internal micro boiling, micro explosions and micro diffusion flames, and that their existence exerts strong influences on evaporation characteristics of a micro plastic-resin particle. Also calculated is the burning rate constant of the micro plastic-resin particle.