TY - JOUR
T1 - Tandem Catalysts for Polyethylene Upcycling
T2 - A Simple Kinetic Model
AU - Guironnet, Damien
AU - Peters, Baron
N1 - Funding Information:
B.P. acknowledges support from Catalysis for Polymer Upcycling, a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences, under Contract DE-AC-02-07CH11358. D.G. acknowledges support from the U.S. National Science Foundation CBET Award Number 17-06911. We thank members of the iCOUP team and the reviewers for helpful discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2020 American Chemical Society.
PY - 2020/5/14
Y1 - 2020/5/14
N2 - Of all plastics, the most abundantly produced is polyethylene, most of which is destined for landfills, shipping ports, and natural environments. The limited degradability and recyclability of this synthetic polymer motivates the development of chemical recycling methods. One possible approach consists of selective depolymerization to propylene with tandem olefin metathesis and double bond isomerization catalysts. In this paper, we transform thousands of coupled rate equations, pseudo-steady-state approximations, and local density approximations into one simple and analytically solvable Fokker-Planck type equation. The Fokker-Planck equation gives concise expressions for the rate of propylene production and polymer molecular weight evolution as functions of catalyst concentrations, rate constants, and ethylene concentrations.
AB - Of all plastics, the most abundantly produced is polyethylene, most of which is destined for landfills, shipping ports, and natural environments. The limited degradability and recyclability of this synthetic polymer motivates the development of chemical recycling methods. One possible approach consists of selective depolymerization to propylene with tandem olefin metathesis and double bond isomerization catalysts. In this paper, we transform thousands of coupled rate equations, pseudo-steady-state approximations, and local density approximations into one simple and analytically solvable Fokker-Planck type equation. The Fokker-Planck equation gives concise expressions for the rate of propylene production and polymer molecular weight evolution as functions of catalyst concentrations, rate constants, and ethylene concentrations.
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U2 - 10.1021/acs.jpca.0c01363
DO - 10.1021/acs.jpca.0c01363
M3 - Article
C2 - 32310647
AN - SCOPUS:85084696098
VL - 124
SP - 3935
EP - 3942
JO - Journal of Physical Chemistry A
JF - Journal of Physical Chemistry A
SN - 1089-5639
IS - 19
ER -