Abstract: The global plastic production increased over years due to the vast applications of plastics in many sectors. The increasing consumption of plastics has led to a large amount of waste plastics being discarded in the natural environment, which contributed to the environmental problems. Now, plastic pollution has been one of the most important environmental problems faced today. And it is extremely urgent to dispose waste plastics rationally. As petroleum-based materials, waste plastics are potential hydrocarbon resources. Rational recycling of waste plastics has broad application prospects to cope with the energy crisis. Therefore, in this work, supercritical water gasification technology is employed to recycle waste plastics. With the excellent properties of supercritical water, such as high diffusivity, reactivity, and organic solubility, waste plastics have been successfully converted into clean fuels, and a batch of carbon spheres with excellent appearance have been prepared. Based on these carbon spheres, their formation conditions and mechanisms are also discussed. Moreover, the surface hydrophobic properties of these carbon spheres are also tested to find the relationship between the morphology of carbon spheres and their hydrophobic properties. Finally, in view of the particularity of this work, this method of plastics gasification in supercritical water is also expected to be applied to the drag reduction and anti-corrosion measures of small-size pipelines.

Keywords: Supercritical water; Plastic; Gasification; Carbon spheres

Biography: Dr Hui Jin is a full professor in State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University. His research fields focus on a poly-generation technology based on coal gasification for hydrogen production, power generation and heat supply, and nano material synthesis in supercritical water. He has published more than 90 paper with more than 2100 citations with an h-index 27. Five first-author papers have been selected into ESI top papers (1 hot paper). He also has public or authorized 15 patents, 12 invited talks.