Abstract
Abstract The amount of food waste that is generated all over the world is enormous. As food wastes are rich in nutrients and organics, they serve as a potential source for the generation of many value-added commodities and energy. In most countries, food wastes are predominately dumped in open lands or incinerated, along with other combustible materials such as municipal solid wastes, for the possible extraction of energy. However, these two modes of food wastes disposal are encountering more and more environmental, technical, and economical challenges. More recently, it has been realized that food wastes can be transformed into energy and value-added products, such as horticultural biochars, using thermochemical technologies such as pyrolysis and gasification. In the current research work, three selected food items, carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes, have been studied using thermogravimetric analysis. The biochar analysis involves one single food item (carrot), one binary mixture (carrot + cucumber), and one ternary blend of carrot, cucumber, and tomato. Two heating rates were used in order to perform kinetic modeling studies using the Arrhenius and Coats-Redfern models. Since the production of the pyrolysis gases—for energy and chemicals production—is of major economic significance regarding the overall process viability, the TGA syngas for a single component, binary component and tertiary component systems were analyzed by TGA coupled mass spectrometry. The results of the gas analysis indicate an increase in hydrogen generation due to blending the food wastes.
Highlights
Solid wastes are generated enormously around the globe because of the fast-paced rates of urbanization and industrialization
T1 where vi represents the volumetric share of gas component (m3 kg−1), refers to the heating rate of pyrolysis process (K/min), vc corresponds to the volumetric flow rate of carrier gas, m denotes the mass of the feedstock sample used for the analysis, ICi refers to the peak ion current of the gas component (A), ICi represents the ion current of the carrier gas (A), T1 and T2 are the lower and upper limits of the integral function, indicating the temperature range used in the calculation
Different syngas compositions in binary and ternary mixtures signify that the interaction between carrot–cucumber and carrot–cucumber–tomato is different
Summary
Solid wastes are generated enormously around the globe because of the fast-paced rates of urbanization and industrialization. Biochar is a charcoal-like material that is full of benefits and is the result of the conversion of waste to products through the pyrolysis process [6]. The vast quantities of food waste generated are a strong motivation to use them in waste to energy conversion owing to their unique properties This is especially true if methods like pyrolysis are used to transform them [20, 21]. In this study, the characteristics of pyrolytic decomposition of tomato, cucumber, and carrot wastes using TGA have been investigated. The information on the thermal characteristics and pyrolytic decomposition kinetics will be helpful in the design of pyrolyzer systems and in the calculation of the heat and mass balance of the process
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