Characterization of Automotive Paint Sludge (APS) for Chemical/Energy Recovery via Microwave Assisted Pyrolysis

Abstract

This paper reported on the characterization of the Automotive Paint Sludge (APS) via several characterisation technique. It is an essential to search the physical and chemical characterization of the automotive paint sludge sample for further microwave assisted pyrolysis experiment for chemical and energy recovery from APS. APS contains about 2.9%, 2.4%, 75.9% and 3.2% of ash, moisture, volatile matter and fixed carbon content respectively. Both wet and dried APS samples show similar FTIR peak at the hydrocarbon region while wet sample have high water content. Meanwhile zero moisture (ZM) sample loss almost 90% of its content on the hydrocarbon. This shows that wet automotive paint sludge samples can be used in the microwave pyrolyzer without any pretreatment and the water can act as an absorbance to microwave radiation. While APS itself contains about 22.6 MJkg-1of energy. Furthermore, melting temperature of automotive paint sludge are in the range of 260 °C to 500 °C with the enthalpy in the range of 40 J/g to 300 J/g. Chemical composition of APS for all three conditions can be described as C38H10N9S, C102H9N21S and C85H8N21S for wet sample, open air dry sample and zero moisture sample respectively.