Old Tires Can be Made of Silicon Carbide with Extensive Use

The main raw materials of tires are from natural and synthetic rubber (whose 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, but due to the cost reason, there are still about 13% of the waste tyres that are directly thrown into the landfill. At the same time, the world's waste tyre recycling mostly adopts the method of pyrolysis and gasification, which can help to recycle energy and some valuable materials. From the point of recycling economy, it does not maximize the function of material cost and sustainable development.

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

The R&D team extracted volatile gas in the process of burning waste tires successfully, which is also called synthetic gas that is mainly composed of hydrogen, carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2) and Methane. The gasification process for synthetic gas can help to produce solid carbon rods, and then the chemical reaction between carbon and silicon oxide at high temperature can help to produce silicon carbide, which is the basic materials of ceramics and electronic industry.

Subsequently, the R&D team designs and develops a small demonstration prototype that can process waste tires 20kg per hour on the basis of waste tyre processing production technology successfully, and each index parameters test and structure get the optimization. The high purity extraction technology can help to produce 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 development of high purity silicon carbide materials, has been successfully applied to the production of drinking water filtration membrane.