Abstract—Plastic wastes are a global concern for their environmental impacts. A proficiency method for plastic waste management is a chemical recycling through a pyrolysis process. In this work, kinetic analysis of thermal degradation of polyolefin mixture between polypropylene (PP) and low density polyethylene (LDPE) under pyrolysis atmosphere at different compositions was investigated using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), operated non-isothermally. Besides, Vyazovkin model-free method, together with different temperature integral approximation approaches, was used for kinetic parameter analysis from TGA results. It was found that thermal degradation process of polyolefin mixture was a triple step process and an addition of PP reduced degradation temperature. Besides, different approximation approaches did not affect activation energy value. For polyolefin mixture, the activation energy was increased initially, constant intermediately and finally increased again with increasing conversion. Finally, the activation energy of the polyolefin mixture was lower than those of pure polymers and decreased with increasing PP fraction.
Index Terms—Thermal degradation, polyolefin, kinetic analysis, thermogravimetric analysis, Vyazovkin model-free method.
The authors are with the Department of Industrial Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand (e-mail: nonglakm50@gmail.com, parimanan@gmail.com).
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Cite:N. Murichan and P. Cherntongchai, "Kinetic Analysis of Thermal Degradation of Polyolefin Mixtures," International Journal of Chemical Engineering and Applications vol. 5, no. 2 pp. 169-175, 2014.
