There is a significant interest in correlating polymer structure with thermal degradation behavior. Thus, polymer pyrolysis curves could be predicted from the chemical structure of the polymer. Recent proposals correlate the kinetic temperature function directly with the chemical structure of the polymer by means of the dissociation energy while assuming a semi-empirical first order model…
An enhanced general analytical equation has been developed in order to evaluate the kinetic parameters of the thermal degradation of poly(lactic acid) (PLA) at various linear heating rates and at constant rate conditions. This improvement consisted of replacing the n-order conversion function by a modified form of the Sestak-Berggren equation f(α) = c(1−α)nαm, which led…
Colour analysis appears to be a robust technique for characterizing vitamin E doping and gamma irradiation of medical grade polyethylene samples. The analysis procedure described in this paper is of great interest because it can easily distinguish between polyethylene samples with differences in vitamin E (α-tocopherol) doping of about 0.1 wt% and gamma irradiation doses of…