Study on the difference between in-situ and ex-situ catalytic pyrolysis of oily sludge

In-situ catalytic pyrolysis has simple process configuration and low cost. Ex-situ catalytic pyrolysis can optimize the pyrolysis capacity and upgrade catalysis, and the catalytic can be reused. But there have been few studies researched on compare in-situ and ex-situ catalytic pyrolysis of the OS performed in similar reactor with two kinds of catalytic. This paper study the pyrolysis of oily sludge (OS) uses CaO and oily pyrolysis char as catalytic at 700 °C. Through analysis the pyrolysis oil (PO), pyrolysis solid (PS) and pyrolysis gas (PG) during pyrolysis procedure to research the difference between in-situ and ex-situ catalytic pyrolysis. The gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) results show that CaO was conducive to the synthesis of aromatics, which content more than aliphatics and heterocyclics in CaO-i (i: in-situ) and CaO-e (e: ex-situ) groups. However, char greatly inhibits the production of aromatic compounds and promotes the production of aliphatic compounds. Gas chromatography (GC) results present that the char and CaO can greatly increase the content of combustible gas and the content reach to 85.85%, the pyrolysis gas (PG) keep at the highest combustion performance in char-CaO-i group. Meanwhile, compared with uncatalyzed groups, the content of CH₄ and CO increased about 2.05% and 3.93%, respectively. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) show that char and CaO reduce the function groups number of pyrolysis solid (PS), and it shows that the pyrolysis reaction is more complete. This research is expecting to provide theory support for catalytic pyrolysis of OS.