Processing Tires to Produce Oil.
There are several methods being used to produce oil from tires;
In this process the tires are cut up and shredded into quite small 1" pieces, before being fed into a liquefaction reactor vessel containing hot oil @ 700F.
Here the rubber pieces are melted in the oil (old engine oil is sometimes be used) and are liquefied into two types of oil; light condensate oil and a heavier more viscous tar-like oil.
The light oil is extracted from the top of the reactor, with the heavy tire oil being drawn of from the reactor bottom section.
The light oil can be further processed to diesel or heating oil; the heavier oil being further processed to marine, heating or lube-oil.
Both types of oil require further processing including filtration and electromagnetic separation to remove the other components such as nylon fluff and reinforcing wire.
The heavy oil can also be processed into a syngas; this process will be covered later.
The tires are shredded into 2" pieces, and put through a vibrating screen that removes oversize pieces, returning these to the shredder.
The remaining pieces are conveyed to a reactor where hot hydrocarbon vapors containing combustible gas and vaporized oil are produced. This leaves solids of carbon black and steel which are removed from the reactor for further processing and recycling.
The solids are removed by water-washing/ spraying techniques, the gases being fed into a condenser where most of the oil vapors are condensed and the resultant liquid oil drawn of from the bottom of the condenser, and stored.
The remaining gases in the condenser are pressurized and used as fuel in the pyrolysis process, making this system self-sufficient in energy, with any surplus gas being used to fuel steam boilers in the plant.