Municipal solid waste incineration fly ash sintered lightweight aggregates and kinetics model establishment

Municipal solid waste incineration fly ash blended with pine sawdust and shale, using a neotype trefoil rotary kiln to form lightweight aggregates, is an effective and a potential means method of fly ash disposal. The optimum sintering conditions of Trefoil rotary kiln were determined in terms of an orthogonal test by measuring the pellets’ bulk density, granule strength, 1 h water absorption. As far as the kinetics is concerned, an integral method of Coats–Redfern was introduced to analyze the kinetics characteristics of the mixture samples. Also, the kinetic triplets (apparent activation energy, pre-exponential factor and reaction order) were estimated by the reaction of kinetics model functions. It is shown that the optimum sintering conditions are as follows: (a) preheating temperature of 500 °C, (b) sintering temperature of 1130 °C, (c) holding time of 4 min. The optimum reaction models of the four stages are Avrami–Erofeev, Mample, Avrami–Erofeev and There-dimensional diffusion (Jander), respectively.