Thermal processing of sewage sludge by drying, pyrolysis, gasification and combustion

Thermal processing of sewage sludge including drying, pyrolysis and gasification or combustion may be an alternative to other ways of utilising it. In this paper thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) was employed in the investigation of thermal decomposition of sewage sludge. The kinetic parameters of drying, pyrolysis and gasification or combustion of sewage sludge have been determined in an inert-gas (argon) and additionally some series of the sludge decomposition experiments have been carried out in air, in order to compare pyrolysis and combustion. The pyrolysis char has been gasified with carbon dioxide. A typical approach to the kinetics of thermal decomposition of a solid waste is to divide the volatile evolution into a few fractions (lumps), each of which is represented by a single first-order reaction. If these lumps are assumed to be non-interacting and evolved by independent parallel reactions the first-order kinetic parameters such as activation energy Ei and pre-exponential factor Ai can be determined from mathematical evaluation of TG or DTG curves. The object of our investigations was a municipal sludge from the two wastewater treatment plants (WTP) in Poland. The experiments have been carried out in the thermobalance Mettler-Toledo type TGA/SDTA851 LF, in the temperature range 30-1,000°C. Five different values of heating rate have been applied β = 2, 5, 10, 15 and 20 K/min. The values of Ei and Ai have been determined for all recognised lumps of gaseous products. The method employed has also revealed its usefulness for the determination of kinetic parameters for municipal sludge, that possess an undefined content. An alternative route to combustion of sewage sludge is its gasification, which significantly increases the gaseous product (pyrolytic gas + syngas). Besides pyrolysis kinetics, gasification or combustion process kinetics have also been determined.