In 2017, the United States generated approximately 4 million tons of waste tires, and 18% of these tires were disposed of in landfills. This resulted in 60 million accumulated tire stockpiles in the United States [2]. The rubber component in tires is water and abrasion resistant and takes more than 100 years to be destroyed, this leads to heavy pollution of the environment.  To reduce land-disposed pollution of tires, gasification technology has been proposed to convert tires for syngas production.

Studies show that thermal conversions of tires are affordable and reduce environmental impact [2]. Waste tires would be an ideal calorific fuel biomass material because waste tires have an organic matter composition of more than 90% [3]. The hydrogen production to feedstock ratio was found to be 0.154 for tires, which was also competitive to one of the higher quality coals available for fuel usage which has a ratio of 0.158, making tires a good source to produce hydrogen [2]. The proposed system will employ syngas produced from tire gasification in a SOFC.

The objective is to determine the thermodynamic performance of gasification-based waste tire integrated energy conversion systems. The performance will be evaluated based on the system efficiencies and a parametric study will determine optimal operating conditions. A one-dimensional kinematics model has been developed to stimulate the tire gasification process and MATLAB will be used to model the SOFC.

[1] Wang, Ting. “An Overview of IGCC Systems.” Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) Technologies, 2017, pp. 1–80., doi:10.1016/b978-0-08-100167-7.00001-9.

[2] Hasan, Ahmed, and Ibrahim Dincer. “Assessment of an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle Using Waste Tires for Hydrogen and Fresh Water Production.” International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, vol. 44, no. 36, 2019, pp. 19730–19741., doi:10.1016/j.ijhydene.2019.05.075.