Experimental Studies on Hydrothermal Treatment of Municipal Solid Waste for Solid Fuel Production

Using the Hydrothermal process to reduce the volume of the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) which is mostly organic component and to utilize the solid powder resulted as coal-like solid fuel will contribute not only to solving the MSW problem but also reducing the coal consumption in the power plant. In this study, the hydrothermal processes were conducted using a laboratory scale apparatus with MSW components as the samples. The process parameters comprised temperature, solid load, and holding time. Four components were used as representative of organics and plastics in the municipal solid waste. In this study, the experiments were done performed at various temperatures, 180 °C, 200 °C, and 220 °C inside an experimental autoclave. The results of the experiments show that the process time, the water amount and the temperature which are used in hydrothermal process, affect the proximate and ultimate compositions. The moisture and fixed carbon content decrease and the volatile matter increases, so that the calorific value of MSW increases. On the basis of the experiments, the optimum hydrothermal process parameters are feed to water ratio of 1/1 (250 g/250 ml), temperature of 180 °C, and holding time of 90 min. It also can be concluded that the hydrothermal process can be applied to MSW to produce solid fuel.