| Abstract: | The dehydrochlorination and the thermal decomposition of five PVC materials was studied using two techniques: a batch analytical method, combining ion chromatography and atomic absorption and continuous thermogravimetry. The temperatures studied ranged from 60°C to 120°C, over a period of almost one year (50 weeks). It was found that a very large proportion of the soluble chloride emitted early on by the PVC materials into the liquid phase is not hydrogen chloride. None of the five materials tested emitted significant amounts of HCl at temperatures lower than 105°C. The emissions at 90°C after 50 weeks ranged from <0.01 Φg/g to 23.62 Φg/g. Furthermore, one of the materials tested emitted virtually no HCl, even at 105°C, as the amount of HCl measured was almost indistinguishable from the normal background of the analytical instruments (37.30 Φg/g after 50 weeks). Numerical calculations of kinetic reaction rates and extrapolation of the results to use temperatures (40°C) indicate that properly stabilized PVC compounds will be unlikely to lose 1% of the mass of PVC as HCl until 2 billion years have passed. This number has no physical meaning as such and may be incorrect by a vast margin, but it clearly indicates that a 1% loss of HCl is unlikely to occur during the useful lifetime of a commercial product into which the PVC material has been fabricated. This is a conservative estimate, which ignores the much higher activation energy for dehydrochlorination at temperatures below the glass transition temperature (ca. 85°C). Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
