Authors: Gorazd Berčič Petar Djinović Albin Pintar
Publish Date: 2016/09/29
Volume: 128, Issue: 1, Pages: 443-456
Abstract
Catalytic depolymerization of polyethylene PE over several aluminosilicate catalysts was studied using thermogravimetric TG analysis Procedure was proposed for decoupling mass loss related directly to the catalyst and that of PE depolymerization The benefit of this approach is twofold 1 It enables a more realistic kinetic analysis and 2 reduces the total number of required experiments with the pure catalyst by more than 50 The activation energies of PE depolymerization over different catalysts were calculated from the treated PETG profiles using advanced isoconversional analysis and were compared to those obtained from raw TG profiles The presented analysis reveals that neglecting the mass loss associated with the aluminosilicate catalyst results in underestimated values of calculated activation energies at low PE conversions while at high conversions the values of calculated activation energies were overestimated The apparent PE depolymerization activation energy in the presence of applied catalysts increases in the following order amorphous silica alumina heulandite/clinoptilolite M300 alumina grafted montmorillonite within the conversion range from 0 to 95 The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Ministry of Education Science and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia through Research Project L25465 and the Slovenian Research Agency ARRS for financing the Research Program P20152 The authors kindly acknowledge Mrs Špela Božič for performing the TG experiments
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