title: Pyrolysis of waste polypropylene and characterisation of tar.
abstract: Waste polypropylene (PP) has been pyrolysed to obtain mainly a liquid tar product of high yield (83.5%) with the balance as gas (15.5%) and a little residue (1.0%). The elemental composition of the PP tar was: C: 87.1%, H: 12.6% and O+others: 0.4% (by difference). The tar samples have been characterised by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, heated-probe mass spectrometry and laser -desorption mass spectrometry (LD- MS), to give molecular mass distributions for comparison with molecular mass ranges indicated by size-exclusion chromatography (SEC). About 50% of the tar was soluble in 1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinone, the solvent used for SEC. It appeared to consist mostly of low molecular mass materials with elution time at 20-27 min. Mass ranges from SEC and LD-MS agreed approximately in showing the upper mass limit of the tar to be about 1200 u, consisting of aromatics, alkenes, dialkenes and only minor quantities of alkanes.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Ulaanbaatar-51, Mongolia.
authors.forename: Barnasan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Purevsuren
authors.forename: Ya
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Davaajav
authors.forename: Fatma
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Karaca
authors.forename: Trevor J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Morgan
authors.forename: Anthe
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: George
authors.forename: Alan A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Herod
authors.forename: Rafael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kandiyoti