Thermal decomposition of flexible polyurethane foam under nitrogen and air atmospheres: Thermogravimetric analysis by ETp method

Abstract

The thermal decomposition of flexible polyurethane foam (FPUF) is investigated by thermogravimetric (TG) analysis with dynamic runs at four heating rates (5, 10, 15, and 20 °C min−1) under nitrogen and air atmospheres. A reaction scheme consisting of six competitive and consecutive reactions is proposed for thermal decomposition of FPUF. The results show that the reaction scheme fits all the experimental data in this work. The kinetic parameters are extracted by model-fitting methods, based on the shuffled complex evolution (SCE) algorithm, and Gpyro software. The model-fitting methods are the EA method and the ETp method (Zhu and Liu, Thermochimica Acta, 690, 2020). This work is the first effort to analyze polymer thermal decomposition using the ETp method. The outstanding performance of the ETp-SCE method is confirmed via comparison with the EA-SCE method. The results show that the ETp method is applicable for polymer, oxidizing atmosphere, competitive reaction, consecutive reaction, SCE algorithm, and Gpyro software.