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____.
【视听版科学小组荣誉出品】
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____.
【视听版科学小组荣誉出品】
lubrication
gets dumped
decomposing
in the absence of oxygen
tossing the oil down the drain
为了让你的汽车引擎继续发动，你就要换油。这种行为每年会产生80亿加仑使用过的机油。其中某些废油会被重新精炼，生产出用于润滑或加热的新油，而某些废油则会成为垃圾。因此，如果我们可以将使用过的机油转化成某些真正有价值的东西——比如说新的汽油——环境就会更加美好，我们也可以使用新燃料。这就是研究小组在做的事情。他们在美国化学会年度会议上展示了研究成果。
他们使用了高温分解的方法，在缺氧高温的环境下分解有机材料。高温可以让废油分解变成成气态、液态和一点点固态。其中气态和液态的物质可以转变成汽油或柴油。但传统的高温分解方法并不是很适合用在机油上。
新的分解技术将机油和一种容易吸收微波辐射的材料混合在一起。测试证明，用微波加热这种混合物，可以让90%的机油分解成可以转变为燃料的物质——这比将废油倒进水沟里好多了。