Engineering, 2015, 7, 717-732 Published Online October 2015 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/eng http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/eng.2015.710063 How to cite this paper: Matee, V.E. and Manyele, S.V. (2015) Analysis of Temperature Profiles and Cycle Time in a Large-Scale Medical Waste Incinerator. Engineering, 7, 717-732. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/eng.2015.710063 Analysis of Temperature Profiles and Cycle Time in a Large-Scale Medical Waste Incinerator Veilla E. Matee, Samwel V. Manyele Department of Chemical and Mining Engineering, University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Email: veilla.elisante@mnh.or.tz , smanyele@udsm.ac.tz Received 29 May 2015; accepted 27 October 2015; published 30 October 2015 Copyright © 2015 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract Temperature profiles and cycle times in a large-scale medical waste incinerator installed in a re- ferral hospital were used to assess the performance and functionality of incinerator. The study was conducted using data collected from 8 cycles per days for 67 days. For proper combustion and destruction of toxic components in the primary chamber and destruction of pollutants and toxic components in the flue gas, it is desired to reach the maximum temperature in the chambers faster and maintain this maximum temperature for an extended time interval. The primary and secon- dary temperatures T1 and T2, respectively, were recorded at an interval of one minute for different cycles. Different amounts of wastes with varying proportions of sharps and other wastes were loaded into the incinerator and temperature profiles recorded. The analysis shows that the incin- erator works at primary temperature less than the required recommended by manufacturer while the secondary chamber operates between 600 and above 950˚C, although higher temperatures up to 1020˚C were observed. The average load preparation time was observed to be 14.6 minutes, while the chamber preheating time before daily initial loading was 25.45 minutes. Both tempera- ture profiles were observed to have similar shapes for all combustion cycles studied, except when incinerator malfunctioning occurred. The average cycle time was established to be 32.7 minutes and 28.97 minutes based on time to drop to 550˚C after the maximum temperature and loading time intervals, respectively, although longer cycle times were observed. Temperature drop in both combustion chambers as a result of waste charging was observed in the interval of 5 minutes. The chamber heating rate was observed to decrease exponentially with time during both preheating and incineration operation. Keywords Medical Waste Management, Infectious Waste, Pathological Waste, Sharps Waste, Incineration,