NIR, DSC, and FTIR as quantitative methods for compositional analysis of blends of polymers obtained from recycled mixed plastic waste

• Methods for the determination of the composition of two binary blends in mixtures of recycled polymeric materials were analyzed and compared. Recycled polypropylene/polyethylene (PP/HDPE) and recycled poly(acryl-butadiene-styrene) and polypropylene(ABS/PP) were used to develop and validate the methods. Diffuse reflectance near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) offers high sensitivity and ease of operation and a possibility to perform multivariate data analysis. In comparison, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and Mid-IR which are commonly used for this purpose require certain sample preparation and are indeed time consuming. In addition, the low sensitivity of these two methods to concentrations lower than 1% wt makes their application in quality control of recycled polymers inappropriate. NIR can be used for estimating the composition of the recyclate on-line in only a few seconds, no sample preparation is required, and high precision is achieved. We obtained a root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) equal to 0.21% wt in the interval from 0-15% wt of PP in HDPE and a RMSEP equal to 0.91% wt in the interval 0-100%. For blends of PP/ABS a RMSEP of 0.74% wt in the range 0-100% and 0.32% wt in the range 0-15% wt PP was calculated. Most of the variation in the spectral data with respect to the polymer blend composition for all the studied blends were explained by two principal components (PC). The optimal number of factors (PC) was determined by cross-validation analysis.

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near-infrared spectroscopy

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