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Engineering and technology
- Reacting systems
- Chemical kinetics and thermodynamics
- Modelling, simulation and optimisation
- Chemical process design
- Recycling
Advanced recycling can play a major role in valorizing the huge amount of waste tires. Liquid energy carriers produced from waste tires can be classified as sustainable aviation fuels due to their high biogenic content (up to 47%). This is not only a solution for waste tires but also increases the sustainability of air travel. Yet, advanced recycling of tires is still in its infancy and the application of oils produced by classical pyrolysis techniques is impossible without upgrading. A promising solution uses supercritical water to convert waste rubber streams into useful chemicals and oils, showing a superior performance in terms of impurity removal and reduction of polyaromatic product formation. However, this novel process is still far from understood in terms of chemistry, selectivity and efficiency. This project aims to resolve this lack of understanding, starting from the detailed compositional analysis of waste tire pyrolysis oils. Theoretical and kinetic modeling work using different techniques, such as kinetic Monte-Carlo and the Method of Moments, will be initiated to reveal the decomposition pathways. This detailed kinetic modeling will be combined with sophisticated experimental work to validate the constructed microkinetic models and identify the ideal trade-off between accuracy and computational time. These experimentation and modeling efforts will provide unique data for resolving the challenges of advanced tire recycling.