CATALYTIC DEGRADATION OF POLYSTYRENE. MODELING OF MOLECULAR WEIGHT DISTRIBUTIONS. EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION

GIANOGLIO PANTANO, IOANA A.; DÍAZ, MÓNICA F.; ASTEASUAIN, MARIANO; BRANDOLIN, ADRIANA; SARMORIA, CLAUDIA

Los Cocos, Córdoba

Simposio; V Argentine-Chilean Polymer Symposium / VII Argentine Polymer Symposium / IX Chilean Symposium of Polymer Chemistry and Physical Chemistry; 2009

Comité Organizador Archipol '09

In this work, PS degradation is deeply studied as an initial step in the development of a mathematical model of the complete compatibilization reaction.  Previously, we have modeled the effect of AlCl3 on PS, predicting accurately the PS average molecular weights during the reaction (Gianoglio et al. 2009a). However, it should be pointed out that final properties depend not only on average molecular weights but on the complete molecular weight distribution (MWD). Then, MDW evolution was predicted for PS degradation by means of a mathematical model where the mass balances were transformed using probability generating functions (Gianoglio et al., 2009b). In the present work we validate model results on MWD with experimental data obtained in our laboratory.