Hydrogen-rich syngas production by gasification of Urea-formaldehyde plastics in supercritical water

Supercritical water is a promising medium to convert plastics into hydrogen and other recyclable products efficiently. In previous research, supercritical water gasification characteristics investigations focus on thermoplastics instead of thermoset plastics due to its chemical, thermal and mechanical stability. Urea-formaldehyde (UF) plastics were selected as a typical kind of thermoset plastics for investigation in this paper and quartz tubes were used as the reactor in order to avoid the potential catalytic effect of metal reactor wall. Conversion characteristic were studied and the influence of different operating parameters such as temperature, reaction time, feedstock mass fraction and pressure were investigated respectively. The molar fraction of hydrogen could reach about 70% in 700 °C. Products in gas phase and solid phase were analyzed, and properties, chemical structures and inhibition mechanism of thermoset plastics was analyzed after comparing with polystyrene (PS) plastics. The result showed that increase of high temperature and long reaction time could promote gasification process, meanwhile the increase in the feedstock mass fraction would result in suppression of the gasification process. Finally, kinetic study of UF was carried out and the activation energy and pre-exponential factor of the Arrhenius equation were calculated as 30.09 ± 1.62 kJ/mol and 0.1199 ± 0.0049 min−1, respectively.