Old Tires can be Made into Silicon Carbide

The main raw material of the tires is natural and synthetic rubber (the main ingredient is hydrocarbon polymer) and other compounds and materials, such as carbon black, metal oxide and steel components. Although the world's major countries actively encourage the recycling of waste tires in different ways, still about 13% of the waste tires are put directly into the landfill due to the cost. At the same time, the world's waste tires recycling adopt the methods of pyrolysis and gasification for the recycling of more valuable materials and energy sources. From the point of recycling economy, it doesn’t achieve the the maximization of the costs and benefits and sustainable development.

EU's seventh research and development framework programme (FP7) environmental theme is offered 3.4 million EUR in funding, total R&D spending 4.3 million EUR. The European TYGRE R&D team is made up of six members of  European Union  and Italy (total coordination), France, Germany, Denmark, Hungary and Turkey, and nine research institutions and innovative small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs). Since 2009, they have committed to the research and development of high value-added application of waste tires, and have successfully developed the wide use of high purity silicon carbide (SiC) materials.　　

The R&D team has successfully extracted volatile gas in the process of burning waste tires, and synthetic gas is mainly composed of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2) and Methane (Methane), which needs gasification process to produce synthetic solid carbon rods, and then bring carbon and silicon oxide into chemical reaction at high temperature to produce silicon carbide (Silicon Carbide), and silicon carbide material is the basic materials of ceramic and electronic industries.

Subsequently, the R&D team designs and develops a small demonstration prototype that can deal with 20kg per hour processing of waste tires on the basis of waste tires processing production technology in the successful implementation. Each index parameters test and structure get the optimization. The high purity extraction technology is used to produce the high quality silicon carbide powder (TyGReSiC), which has a wide range of industrial applications. Demonstration model has passed the technical and economic feasibility assessment, life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle of economic and social benefit evaluation. The developed high purity silicon carbide materials, has been successfully applied to the production of drinking water filtration membrane.

In 2012, the market sales of silicon carbide materials is up to 2.5 million tons around the world, whose price ranges from a few EUR/ton to tens of thousands of EUR/ton, mainly used three major industries: metallurgical industry (60%), corrosion resistance and ceramic industry (28%) and electronic products (12%). TYGRE R&D team’s silicon carbide material is completely in accord with standards of high quality high added value in all the functional indices.