Effect of organic peroxides on the thermal decomposition of expanded polystyrene with the addition of α-methylstyrene

Abstract

Recently, as a part of thermal recycling, in order to reduce the consumption of energy and get oligostyrene of several thousands of molecular weight, which can be used as a kind of fuel oil, the thermal decomposition of expanded polystyrene (EPS) with α-methylstyrene as a chain-transfer agent was studied at a temperature about 200 °C. In this work, three kinds of organic peroxides were used as radical accelerators in the thermal decomposition of EPS with α-methylstyrene. We found that the addition of dicumyl peroxide (DCP) enhanced the thermal decomposition of EPS even at lower temperature, about 140 °C, but the addition of tert-butylcumyl peroxide (BCP) was less effective than DCP. On the other hand, di- tert-butyl peroxide had almost no effect on the thermal decomposition of EPS. The activation energy, determined from the rate coefficients, were 66.6 and 70.5 kJ/mol for DCP and BCP, respectively.