Waste Management 22 (2002) 485–490

www.elsevier.com/locate/wasman

Treatment and recycling of incinerated ash using

thermal plasma technology
T.W. Chenga,*, J.P. Chub, C.C. Tzengc, Y.S. Chena
a
Department of Materials & Mineral Resources Engineering, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China
b
Institute of Materials Engineering, National Taiwan Ocean University, Keelung, Taiwan, Republic of China
c
Physics Division, Institute of Nuclear Energy Research, Lung-Tan, Taiwan, Republic of China

Accepted 19 June 2001

Abstract
To treat incinerated ash is an important issue in Taiwan. Incinerated ashes contain a considerable amount of hazardous materials
such as dioxins and heavy metals. If these hazardous materials are improperly treated or disposed of, they shall cause detrimental
secondary contamination. Thermal plasma vitrification is a robust technology to treat and recycle the ash residues. Under the high
temperature plasma environment, incinerated ashes are vitrified into benign slag with large volume reduction and extreme detox-
ification. Several one-step heat treatment processes are carried out at four temperatures (i.e. 850, 950, 1050 and 1150  C) to obtain
various ‘‘microstructure materials’’. The major phase to form these materials is a solid solution of gehlenite (Ca2Al2SiO7) and
åkermanite (Ca2MgSi2O7) belonging to the melilite group. The physical and mechanical properties of the microstructure materials
are improved by using one-step post-heat treatment process after plasma vitrification. These microstructure materials with good
quality have great potential to serve as a viable alternative for construction applications. # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights
reserved.

1. Introduction dous waste disposal practices being used to date offer

Disposal of large quantities of municipal solid waste
is a major problem in Taiwan. Incineration has become
an important treating method for combustible solid
wastes, especially in municipal areas due to the increas-
ing difficulty to get suitable sites for traditional landfill.
Currently, there are five municipal waste incinerators
with capacity of more than 300 t per day, and 29 small
medical waste incinerators are in operation in Taiwan
[1]. On the other hand, there are 22 municipal waste
incinerators under construction in Taiwan that are
expected to be complete at the end of 2003. It is esti-
mated that these incinerators will produce over two
million tonnes of incinerated ashes every year when
these new incinerators are all put into operation. Fly
ashes from municipal incinerators are classified as
hazardous materials in Taiwan. With growing public
concerns and rigorous regulatory requirements, hazar-
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +886-2-27712171, ext. 2730; fax:
+886-2-27317185.
E-mail address: twcheng@ntut.edu.tw (T.W. Cheng).
0956-053X/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S0956-053X(01)00043-5
challenges. For example, the ash residues after incin-
eration of municipal solid wastes needs further treat-
ment such as consolidation before it becomes
reasonably safe for the environment. Therefore, a viable
competing immobilization technology is required. This
technology should maximize safety factors and relia-
bility to transfer the ashes into a stable form. Our prior
studies on mixed medical waste vitrification [2] have
shown that thermal plasma is promising technology for
hazardous waste treatment. In thermal plasma vitrifica-
tion, the heat generated from plasma is used to process
hazardous wastes containing metals, inorganic oxides
and/or organics at temperatures above 1500  C. Metal-
bearing wastes are melted and organic contaminants are
thermally destroyed. The plasma vitrification yields a
glass-like, leach-resistant monolith slag, which is envir-
onmentally safe for landfill disposal and/or can be
reused as glass-ceramic for construction materials, such
as interior and exterior wall cladding or ordinary floor
tile applications.
Incinerated ash, containing large amount of silica, can
be a good candidate for glass-ceramic production.
486 T.W. Cheng et al. / Waste Management 22 (2002) 485–490

Glass-ceramic materials are polycrystalline solids con-
sisting of the residual glass phase. The variety of crys-
talline phase and the properties of the glass-ceramic,
including the number of crystals for nucleation, the
growth rate and the microstructure, can be controlled
by the initial composition and by suitable post-heat
treatment. Recent investigations have reported on the
use of a molten and crystallization process to recycle
different waste materials. These waste materials inclu-
ded, for example, red mud from zinc hydrometallurgy
[3], coal fly ash [4–6], blast furnace slags [7,8], industrial
and mining wastes [9], incinerated ashes [10,11]. Thus,
high-temperature molten technology is one of potential
technologies for engineering applications.
In the present study, a lab-scale plasma system built
at Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER) exclu-
sively for the treatment of hazardous/radioactive wastes
was used for vitrification processes. This study was
directed toward characterization of post-heat treatment
for slag generated from plasma technology, in order to
establish a better understanding of the feasibility of the
INER plasma system in treating the incinerated ashes.
The microstructure materials were characterized by
toxicity characteristic leaching procedure (TCLP) for
testing the leaching resistance, X-ray diffractometry
(XRD) for crystal structure determination, scanning
electron microscopy (SEM) for microstructure/mor-
phology observation, and energy dispersive spectro-
scopy (EDS) for X-ray chemical microanalysis. In
addition, other properties, such as microhardness, por-
osity, water absorption and bulk specific gravity were
also evaluated.
2. Experimental procedures
The incinerated ash used in this investigation was
obtained from one of the municipal solid waste incin-
erators in Taipei. Table 1 shows the chemical composi-
tion of the incinerated ash. A 100 kW non-transferred
plasma torch was used as the heat source in the INER
lab-scale plasma system. Argon was the plasma gas for
ignition, and nitrogen was served as the carrier gas
during the treatment. A graphite crucible containing
about 2400 g samples was placed in the center of the
chamber so that a uniform temperature distribution
could be achieved in the crucible. The heating rates of
ash samples were controlled to about 9  C/min. The
molten slag was kept at 1350  C for 10 min, and then
cooled at a cooling rate less than 10  C/min to desired
temperatures for the post-heat treatment. The molten
slag was post-heat treated for 2 h at temperatures of
1150, 1050, 950, and 850  C, and then cooled to room
temperature. The microstructure material thus formed is
cut into small pieces by a diamond saw for material char-
acterizations. For SEM and EDS examinations, a Hitachi
S-4100 scanning electron microscope was used to exam-
ine the microstructure materials that were polished and
etched by 2% HF for 1 min. XRD was done with a
Rigaku D/MAX-VB diffractometer with CuKa radiation.
3. Results and discussions
3.1. Volume and weight reductions
Table 2 shows a list of volume and weight reduction
for microstructure materials in this study. The inciner-
ated ash feeds in general have large volume reduction
ratios (average 6.4) after the plasma molten treatment.
Nevertheless, the weight reduction ratio is about 1.7 on
average. This could be due to the fact that the inciner-
ated ash had less combustible or organic constituents.
TCLP testing results of the microstructure materials
obtained in this study are also given in Table 2. Each
sample analyzed has insignificant leachability char-
acteristics for the Cr, Pb, and Cd. As will be discussed
subsequently, the low leachability is closely related to
the slag structures.
3.2. EDS chemical analysis
Elemental analysis results of the microstructure
materials by X-ray energy dispersive spectrometer are
presented in Table 3. It is shown that major elemental
components of microstructure materials are, in order of

Table 1 Table 2
The major chemical composition of incinerated ash List of post treatment condition, volume and weight reduction ratios
and TCLPa analysis results of microstructure materials
Chemical composition Wt.%
Treated Volume Weight Microstructure material
CaO 32.96 temperature reduction reduction leached (mg/l)
SiO2 12.41 ( C)
Al2O3 8.06 Cr Pb Cd
TiO2 2.18
Fe2O3 2.35 850 6.28 1.71 N/A N/A 0.04
P2O5 1.92 950 5.53 1.69 N/A N/A 0.04
Na2O 5.15 1050 5.77 1.72 N/A N/A 0.04
K2O 2.41 1150 7.82 1.81 N/A N/A 0.04
MgO 2.23 a
TCLP, toxity characteristic leaching procedure.
 T.W. Cheng et al. / Waste Management 22 (2002) 485–490 487

amount measured, calcium, silicon, aluminum, sodium,
magnesium, iron, titanium, and phosphorous, with
trace amounts of carbon, sulfur, chromium, zinc, man-
ganese, and chlorine present. Except for the sulfur, the
effect of heat-treatment temperature was not evident,
suggesting that the post-heat treatment had no apparent
effects in varying the major slag chemical composition.
High sulfur contents in the slag treated at low tempera-
tures implied that the high-temperature thermal treat-
ment is needed for the removal of sulfur.
3.3. XRD phase identification
In order to identify the crystalline phases, XRD was
carried out on the microstructure materials after the
heat treatment at 1150, 1050, 950, and 850  C. XRD
results are shown in Fig. 1. The Joint Committee of
Powder Diffraction Standard (JCPDS) card shows that
the reflections are mainly assigned to two members of the
melilite group—gehlenite (Ca2Al2SiO7) and åkermanite
(Ca2MgSi2O7), with small deviations of the 1-values.
Gehlenite and åkermanite have the same crystal struc-
ture and their lattice parameters are very close to each
other. Therefore, the crystallizing phases could trans-
form essentially into a solid solution of gehlenite and
åkermanite. A similar result was also reported for a
slag-based glass-ceramic in Turkey [8]. The fundamental
unit on the structure of silicates basically consists of four
O 2 at the apices of a regular tetrahedron surrounding
and coordinated by one Si+4 at the center. The strength
of any single Si–O bond is just equal to one-half of the
total bonding energy available in the oxygen ion. Every
O 2 has the potentiality of bonding to another silicon ion
and entering into another tetrahedral grouping, thus
uniting the tetrahedral groups through the shared oxy-
gen, and therefore forming the great variety of silicate
structures. The low leachability characteristics for Cr,
Pb, and Cd thus presumably were because the heavy
metal ions replaced parent ions (Al+3 and Ca+2 in this
study) and enclosed in the framework of silicates.

Table 3
EDSa results for the microstructure materials after heat treatments at various temperatures

Element C S Cr Mn Zn Cl Si K Na Mg Al P Ca Ti Fe
wt.% ( C)

850 0.01 0.19 0.13 0.15 0.40 0.05 14.30 0.72 2.96 2.68 8.00 1.44 25.00 1.53 2.05
950 0.01 0.13 0.11 0.13 0.58 0.05 13.40 0.70 2.81 2.64 7.96 1.58 24.20 1.71 2.42
1050 0.02 0.09 0.12 0.14 0.86 0.05 14.30 0.59 2.77 2.70 7.29 1.51 23.40 1.70 2.32
1150 0.01 0.07 0.10 0.13 0.46 0.01 14.00 0.67 2.85 2.76 8.05 1.51 23.50 1.71 2.21
a
EDS, energy dispersive spectroscopy.

Fig. 1. X-ray diffractometry (XRD) results of the microstructure materials after heat treatments at different temperatures for 2 h.
488 T.W. Cheng et al. / Waste Management 22 (2002) 485–490
Fig. 1 also shows that the Bragg peak intensities were
low after heat treatment for 2 h at 1150  C. This is pre-
sumably resulted from the relatively small driving force
for the phase transformation. At this temperature, the
atomic diffusion rate was high whereas the amounts of
nucleation and crystallization were small. When treated
at low temperatures such as 1050 or 950  C, the driving
force for the phase transformation increased because
more nuclei were obtained. When treated at 850  C, the
driving force increased extensively while the atomic dif-
fusion rate was low, resulting in formation of fewer new
phases.
3.4. SEM microstructural examinations
SEM microstructural examinations of microstructure
materials after heat treatments at different temperatures
were performed and the results are shown in Figs. 2–5.
Fig. 2. Scanning electron microscopic (SEM) micrograph of micro-
structure material sample heat treated for 2 h at 1150 .
Fig. 3. Scanning electron microscopic (SEM) micrograph of micro-
structure material sample heat treated for 2 h at 1050  C.
Based on these micrographs, it can be seen that the
microstructure materials were not thoroughly homo-
geneous. In general, the crystal size decreased with
decreasing heat-treatment temperature. The average
crystal size is around 0.2 mm (Figs. 4 and 5). These
results are in a good agreement with XRD results.
Generally, the crystallization process at a given tem-
perature is controlled by nucleation and growth rates.
Since both nucleation and growth rates vary oppositely
with the temperature, it is expected that those two
curves for nucleation and growth rates will overlap in a
certain temperature range. Accordingly, in this study
optimal temperatures for the heat treatment were iden-
tified to achieve better microstructure. When the micro-
structure materials were heat treated at 1150 or 1050  C,
the crystal growth rate was improved whereas the crys-
tallization was far from optimization due to limited
nucleation rates. On the other hand, the heat treatment
at low temperatures such as 950 or 850  C yields more
Fig. 4. Scanning electron microscopic (SEM) micrograph of micro-
structure material sample heat treated for 2 h at 950  C.
Fig. 5. Scanning electron microscopic (SEM) micrograph of micro-
structure material sample heat treated for 2 h at 850  C.
 T.W. Cheng et al. / Waste Management 22 (2002) 485–490
nuclei as well as an increased nucleation rate, thus pro-
ducing a better and refined crystallization in materials
microstructure (Figs. 4 and 5). Therefore, an improved,
refined gehlenite microstructure material could be
attained after the heat treatment at 850 or 950  C by
using thermal plasma technology.
3.5. Physical and mechanical properties
Various physical and mechanical properties of micro-
structure materials obtained from plasma vitrification
with post-heat treatment at different temperatures are
listed in Table 4. Densities of the microstructure mate-
rials were in the range of 2.9–3.0 g/cm3. Because these
values are comparable with that of melilite (2.95 to 3.0
g/cm3) [12], the melilite as a major crystalline phase in
the microstructure materials is then confirmed, and
consistent with XRD results. The hardness properties
were measured for feasibility evaluation of the materials
for a given purpose. Hardness results shown in Table 4
reveal that the microstructure materials had Knoop
hardness of 4.5–4.8 GPa and Mohs’ scale of 6.5–7.
Thermal expansion is also one of important properties.
As listed in Table 4, relatively low thermal-expansion
coefficients suggest the microstructure materials
obtained are suitable for the high-temperature applica-
tions. Furthermore, preferred evaluation results of other
physical properties (water adsorption, porosity, and
machineability) in Table 4 suggest the microstructure
materials were fairly dense and thus may be useful for
construction applications. It is interesting to note that
many properties such as hardness, porosity, and water
adsorption are improved with decreasing the heat-
treatment temperature. The improved properties are
presumably attributed to the refined structure achieved
in the low-temperature treated sample.
4. Conclusions
Treatment and characterizations of the incinerated
ash by using thermal plasma technology have been car-
ried out. After post-heat treatments at different tem-
peratures, microstructure materials with good quality
Table 4
Various properties of the microstructure materials
Properties 850  C 950  C 1050  C
Density (g/cm3) 2.99 2.96 2.94
Mohs’ hardness 7.0 7.0 6.5
Knoop hardness (GPa) 4.84 4.70 4.62
Porosity (%) 0.83 1.81 2.68
Water absorption (%) 0.28 0.61 0.91
Thermal expansion coefficient 9.85 8.21 8.68
(10 6 mm C; 25–450  C)
Machinability Good Good Good
489
are obtained. After plasma vitrification and one-step
post-heat treatment, large volume and weight reduction
ratios (6.4 and 1.7, respectively) are achieved. Heavy
metals originated in the incinerated ash are confined in
the treated silicate framework, hence yielding very low
leachability results. Therefore, thermal plasma technol-
ogy can be an effective method to treat incinerated
ashes. After the high temperature melting and heat
treatment process, microstructure materials were
formed and consisted of predominantly a melilite group
solid solution of gehlenite and åkermanite. It was found
that the crystallization was progressively improved as
the post-heat treatment temperature was decreased. The
average grain size of the microstructure materials was
 0.2 mm at the heat treatment temperature of 850–
950  C. Microstructure materials with improved physi-
cal and mechanical properties were thus obtained after
being heat treated at low temperatures. Microstructure
materials with preferred properties therefore have the
potential to serve as a viable alternative for construction
applications.
Acknowledgements
The National Science Council of Republic of China
supported this study under contract NSC-89-2211-E-
027-003, which was gratefully acknowledged.
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