Processing plastic waste via pyrolysis-thermolysis into hydrogen and solid carbon additive to ethylene-vinyl acetate foam for cushioning applications.

A strategy for enhancing value creation from pyrolysis gas and oil, derived from plastic waste, through the generation of two additional outputs of solid carbon and hydrogen was investigated. Three types of hard-to-recycle plastic waste (marine plastic litter, household mixed plastics and cosmetic products packaging) were thermally treated in two stages: (i) decomposition of feedstock into gas and oil via pyrolysis at 600 °C; and (ii) thermolytic conversion of the pyrolysis gas and a fraction of oil into hydrogen and solid carbon at 1300 °C separately. The thermolysis of both pyrolysis gas and oil fractions predominantly resulted in the production of solid carbon (39-70 wt% per plastic feedstock and carbon content of 91.

Direct analysis of saturated hydrocarbons using glow discharge plasma ionization source for mass spectrometry.

The ionization source based on glow discharge plasma using ambient air is driven by a pulsed direct-current voltage for soft plasma ionization (SPI). The novelty of this work is that molecular ions [M+13] related to the analyte species (M), which may be formed by numerous oxidation, can be dominantly detected as a base peak with little or no fragmentation of them in an air plasma at a pressure of several kPa. The unique ion [M+13] was assigned to the oxidation product, [M+O-3H], which was confirmed as a deuterated ion [M+O-3D] ([M+10]) by using a deuterated solvent.

Removal of gaseous elemental mercury by hydrogen chloride non-thermal plasma modified biochar.

Hydrogen chloride (HCl) non-thermal plasma was applied to introduce Cl active sites on biochar prepared from sorghum straw in this study. Surface modified biochar was then placed in flue gas with typical components to investigate its elemental mercury (Hg) capture ability. To elucidate the adsorption mechanism & binding properties, samples were characterized by N adsorption, scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive spectrometer (SEM-EDS) and X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) analysis of Hg L-edge, Cl K-edge and S K-edge.