Abdülkadir Ayanoğlu

Investments in photovoltaic solar power plants continue to increase across all provinces of Türkiye. However, Bursa is not among the regions that receive the highest levels of solar radiation compared to the eastern parts of the country. The Soğuksu power plant, located in the village of the same name in Bursa, was commissioned in March 2017 with an installed capacity of 7 MW. In this study, the actual generation data of the power plant for 2022 were analyzed, and the performance ratio (PR) and capacity factor (CF) were calculated. The results show that the minimum electricity generation occurred in December 2021 with 401.21 MWh, while the total electricity production in 2022 reached 10.64 GWh. During the summer season, the plant generated 7,262.8 MWh, corresponding to 68% of its annual production. The lowest performance ratio was observed in June at 75.1%, while the highest capacity factor was recorded in July at 28%. Furthermore, the performance ratios for November, December, and January exceeded 100%. Since the PR is calculated based on the solar energy values reported in the regional solar atlas, such results indicate a notable discrepancy between the published data and the actual site conditions. The exceptionally high PR values during the winter months may suggest that the region experiences milder winters and receives higher solar radiation than the atlas values imply.

The huge amount of waste tires (WTs) have been disposed to surroundings which cause dangerous effect on nature. Owing to recycled WTs, the pyrolysis is a good technique to dismiss harmful effect of the WTs, by converting into gas, liquid and solid. The present study has two steps of liquefaction at a batch reactor. Firstly, conversion of the WTs into gas, waste tire oil (WTO) and char. Then the WTO were blended with calcium oxide (CaO) or natural zeolite (NZ) at different ratio and pyrolyzed to obtain high quality oil, similar to gasoline fuel (GF) or diesel fuel (DF). The distillation curve is a good key to define fuel quaility. Thus, 10% CaO-WTO blend curve near to the DF. Unfortunately, the mixture was distillated at 54 oC, lower than the DF. Therefore, the blend was separated into two fractions due to intial-final boiling points as 150 oC to 360 oC, named as Diesel like fuel (DLF); between 54 oC to 150 oC, called as gasoline like fuel (GLF). Finally, samples were analyzed to characterizate by GC, ICP-MS, TGA and DSC for similarities of conventional fuels. Based on GLF and DLF results, they can be burned in engine.

The significance of tire disposal, an attractive waste to convert into burning oil or absorber etc., has been increasing day by day. However, if it does not change into a useful form, it will damage the nature and the living things. Thus, pyrolysis, a well-known method, which is used to convert recycle tire waste into gas, liquid and char. On the other hand, the waste pyrolysis oil or waste tire oil (WTO) has a substantial avaliable calorific value similar to those of fossil fuels. Due to pyrolysis reaction, high amount of sulfur is detected in the WTO; therefore, another step of explosion applied to WTO to decrease sulfur and also re-upgrade quality of oil with such catalysts as Calcium Oxide (CaO) and Natural Zeolite (NZ) at a ratio from 2 to 10 with an increase of 2 for each step, individually. It is noticed that distillation test is a key analysis for separation discrimination of rich or lean quality fuel. As a consequence of mixture of catalyst-WTO reactions, the best curve was observed at a 10% CaO-WTO mixture which was close to diesel#2 and the mixture was separated into two new fuels as light (Gasoline Like Fuel or abbreviated as GLF) and heavy one (Diesel Like Fuel or shortened as DLF) due to temperature differences. According to distillation, FT-IR, NMR and UV–vis were used to analyze WTO, GLF and DLF for defining their characterization as well. Thus, the characterization result data of samples have quasi-equivalent with standard petroleum in open literature, and can be combusted in engine as well.