Electron beam irradiation process applied to primary and secondary recycled high density polyethylene

• Autor(a) principal: CARDOSO, JESSICA R.
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: MOURA, EDUARDO de, GERALDO, AUREA B.C., INTERNATIONAL NUCLEAR ATLANTIC CONFERENCE
• Tipo de documento: Artigo de conferência
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do IPEN
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.ipen.br/handle/123456789/28351
• topic: absorbed radiation doses; cross-linking; dose rates; electron beams; extrusion; fourier transformation; infrared spectra; polypropylene; recycling; shear; thermal degradation

Plastic bags, packaging and furniture items are examples of plastic utilities always present in life. However, the end-of-life of plastics impacts the environment because of this ubiquity and also often their high degradation time. Recycling processes are important in this scenario because they offer many solutions to this problem. Basically, four ways are known for plastic recycling: primary recycling, which consists in re-extrusion of clean plastic scraps from a production plant; secondary recycling, that uses end-of-life products that generally are reduced in size by extrusion to obtain a more desirable shape for reprocessing (pellets and powder); tertiary recover which is related to thermo-chemical methods to produce fuels and petrochemical feedstock; and quaternary route, that is related to energy recovery and it is done in appropriate reactors. In this work, high density polyethylene (HDPE) was recovered to simulate empirically the primary and secondary recycling ways using materials which ranged from pristine to 20-fold re-extrused materials. The final 20-fold recycled thermoplastic was irradiated in an electron beam accelerator under a dose rate of 22.4 kGy/s and absorbed doses of 50 kGy and 100 kGy. The characterization of HDPE in distinct levels of recovering was performed by infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermogravimetric degradation. In the HDPE recycling, degradation and crosslinking are consecutive processes; degradation is very noticeable in the 20-fold recycled product. Despite this, the 20-fold recycled product presents crosslinking after irradiation process and the post-irradiation product presents similarities in spectroscopic and thermal degradation characteristics of pristine, irradiated HDPE. These results are discussed.