School of Chemical and Materials Engineering (SCME), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Ottawa, 161 Louis Pasteur Street, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada.
Chemosphere. 2022 Nov;307(Pt 3):136050. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2022.136050. Epub 2022 Aug 14.
The massive increase in the use of PET plastic bottles has raised the challenge of accumulated waste plastics disposal and its related environmental concerns. Reusing this plastic waste through a solvent-based recycling process seems to be an eco-friendly solution for eliminating waste plastic and converting them into high quality products. The selection of solvent with its temperature requirement for the dissolution of polymeric materials is crucial in the solvent-based recycling process. Therefore, an innovative MATLAB program named HSPs-TPT was designed and constructed in this work to evaluate the dissolving power of solvents. Through this program, the solubility of the waste PET polymer was examined in thirteen (13) different solvents at different temperatures. As a results, the degree of waste PET polymer dissolution in the solvents was presented as the polymer-solvent solubility diagram, which provided the information about the relative energy difference (RED) change with the temperature rise. The program also provided the temperature range effective for the dissolution of PET by indicating the minimum and maximum solubility point for each solvent, which was further validated by the experimental data found in the literature. The proposed MATLAB program can numerically analyse the solubility of a polymer in different solvents in a short time for the recycling process and fabrication of different value-added plastic products such as polymer monoliths and membrane filters.
大量使用 PET 塑料瓶带来了积累的废塑料处理和相关环境问题的挑战。通过溶剂基回收工艺再利用这种废塑料似乎是消除废塑料并将其转化为高质量产品的环保解决方案。在溶剂基回收工艺中，选择具有溶解聚合材料所需温度的溶剂至关重要。因此，在这项工作中设计并构建了一个名为 HSPs-TPT 的创新 MATLAB 程序，用于评估溶剂的溶解能力。通过该程序，在 13 种不同温度下，对 13 种不同溶剂中废 PET 聚合物的溶解度进行了测试。结果，以聚合物-溶剂溶解度图的形式呈现了溶剂中废 PET 聚合物的溶解程度，该图提供了有关相对能量差 (RED) 随温度升高而变化的信息。该程序还通过文献中找到的实验数据进一步验证，为每个溶剂提供了 PET 溶解的有效温度范围，指示了每个溶剂的最小和最大溶解度点。该提议的 MATLAB 程序可以在短时间内对聚合物在不同溶剂中的溶解度进行数值分析，从而实现回收工艺和制造不同附加值的塑料产品，如聚合物整体和膜过滤器。
