To keep your car purring, you have to change the oil. Such maintenance produces eight billion gallons of used motor oil annually. Some waste oil does get re-refined to produce oil for ——____1____ or heating. And some just ____2____. So it would be more environmentally friendly and provide fresh fuel if we could convert the old motor oil to something really valuable: new gasoline. And that’s what a research team thinks they’ve done. They presented their work at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Their approach involves pyrolysis, ____3____ organic material with heat ____4____. Pyrolysis can break down waste oil into gases, liquids, a little bit of solids. The gases and liquids can be converted into gas or diesel. But conventional pyrolysis methods don’t do a great job with motor oil.
The new technique mixes the oil with a material really good at absorbing microwave radiation. Tests showed that heating this mixture with microwaves was about 90 percent efficient at creating precursors to fuel—which beats ____5____.
【視聽版科學小組榮譽出品】
lubrication gets dumped decomposing in the absence of oxygen tossing the oil down the drain
為了讓你的汽車引擎繼續(xù)發(fā)動，你就要換油。這種行為每年會產生80億加侖使用過的機油。其中某些廢油會被重新精煉，生產出用于潤滑或加熱的新油，而某些廢油則會成為垃圾。因此，如果我們可以將使用過的機油轉化成某些真正有價值的東西——比如說新的汽油——環(huán)境就會更加美好，我們也可以使用新燃料。這就是研究小組在做的事情。他們在美國化學會年度會議上展示了研究成果。 他們使用了高溫分解的方法，在缺氧高溫的環(huán)境下分解有機材料。高溫可以讓廢油分解變成成氣態(tài)、液態(tài)和一點點固態(tài)。其中氣態(tài)和液態(tài)的物質可以轉變成汽油或柴油。但傳統(tǒng)的高溫分解方法并不是很適合用在機油上。 新的分解技術將機油和一種容易吸收微波輻射的材料混合在一起。測試證明，用微波加熱這種混合物，可以讓90%的機油分解成可以轉變?yōu)槿剂系奈镔|——這比將廢油倒進水溝里好多了。