Nano ZnO Catalyst for Chemical Recycling of Polyethylene terephthalate (PET)

Abstract

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.