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(tīng)版科學(xué)小組榮譽(yù)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(dòng)，你就要換油。這種行為每年會(huì)產(chǎn)生80億加侖使用過(guò)的機(jī)油。其中某些廢油會(huì)被重新精煉，生產(chǎn)出用于潤(rùn)滑或加熱的新油，而某些廢油則會(huì)成為垃圾。因此，如果我們可以將使用過(guò)的機(jī)油轉(zhuǎn)化成某些真正有價(jià)值的東西——比如說(shuō)新的汽油——環(huán)境就會(huì)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?cè)诿绹?guó)化學(xué)會(huì)年度會(huì)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(jī)材料。高溫可以讓廢油分解變成成氣態(tài)、液態(tài)和一點(diǎn)點(diǎn)固態(tài)。其中氣態(tài)和液態(tài)的物質(zhì)可以轉(zhuǎn)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(jī)油上。 新的分解技術(shù)將機(jī)油和一種容易吸收微波輻射的材料混合在一起。測(cè)試證明，用微波加熱這種混合物，可以讓90%的機(jī)油分解成可以轉(zhuǎn)變?yōu)槿剂系奈镔|(zhì)——這比將廢油倒進(jìn)水溝里好多了。