Ir Samira Lotfian, Hesham Ahmed, Caisa Samuelsson
Shredder residue material is a plastic containing residue material after separation of main ferrous
and non-ferrous fractions. The amount of SRM is increasing steadily and the issue of its sustainable
disposal management has risen. One solution is to utilize this material as a reductant in metallurgical
processes. As the first step, the thermal decomposition characteristic of SRM needs to be studied
and compared with the properties of current reducing agents, such as coal. In this study devolatilization
characteristics of SRM sample and gasification of SRM char is compared to that of coal sample
using thermogravimetric analysis. It was observed that SRM contains higher amount of volatiles,
while coal contains higher fixed carbon. The volatile matter of SRM consists of compounds such as
H2, CO and hydrocarbons, which are known to have reduction potential. Moreover, the activation
energy for gasification of SRM char is lower than that of coal char.