Assessment of thermal and thermo-oxidative stability of multiextruded recycled PP, HDPE and a blend thereof

Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA) and chemiluminescence (CL) techniques have been used for assessment of thermal and thermo-oxidative stability of recycled PP, HDPE and their blend containing 20 wt.% of PP. The pure polymers and the blend were subjected to six extrusion cycles. The oxidation induction time (OIT) of the PP, PE and the blend decreased with the number of extrusion cycles also did the temperature of oxidation (T-ox). The thermal stability of PE decreased with the number of number of processing cycles, which may indicate that the shear forces during processing induce chain scission of the polymer backbone leading mainly to shortening of the chains. PP, however showed a decrease in thermal stability up to the third extrusion, and about the same stability during further processing. Thus chain scission predominated during all the extrusions and no chain branching or crosslinking were observed. The behaviour of the blend showed a synergetic tendency and did not obey the "mixture rule". The CL runs produced a clearer picture of the oxidation process in blends since two peaks were observed, a sharp one corresponding to the PP and the other of bimodal shape to PE. The PP appeared to oxidize first and accelerated the oxidation of PE due to the presence of oxidation sites in the PE-PP interfaces. The blend of PP an HDPE mechanically mixed appeared to be a two-phase system in the molten state. This information can not be obtained from DSC and TG experiments. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.