Nano ZnO catalyst for chemical recycling of polyethylene terephthalate (PET)‎

Abstract EN

This paper is focused firstly on production of monomers bis (2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate (BHET) and oligomers by using Nano zinc oxide with different particle size (55&94) nm with different weight ratio (0.05, 0.15 and 0.5) by using chemical recycling glass condenser at 190˚C.

The second purpose is to study the effect of catalyst ratio, time of reaction and yield of products of the product.

Elemental analysis for Carbon –Hydrogen and Nitrogen (CHN), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) have been investigated.

Results indicated the catalytic activity was found to correlate with surface area; however, Nano ZnO (55) nm has shown an exceptional activity, still it is higher than Nano ZnO (94) nm in order to reduce the reaction time until 60 minutes instead of 7 hours without catalyst.

The analysis of the thermograms has indicated the presence of various kinds of monomer, dimer and oligomers that are formed during the recycling; this is particularly evident due to new peaks indicating the formation of BHET monomer and oligomer of lower molecular masses.